This is the blog I should have setup 15 years ago. Here I will talk about cool hacks, cooking, cocktails, books I’ve read (or sometimes I haven’t), linguistics… And I decided to use Jekyll to run it.
Why this blog?
I love to share about the stuff I do. At $WORK I manage ops
for the dotCloud PaaS, and I spread the word about lightweight
virtualization, Linux Containers, and Docker.
This content has been published on the dotCloud blog or the
Docker blog.
But, I would also like to talk about other topics, not related to my work (or not directly). So I had to do something I had postponed for the last 15 years or so: setup my own blog :-)
Why Jekyll?
When I wrote my recent entries for the Docker blog, I drafted them in Markdown format, using Gist as a scratchpad. I like neat, lean markup formats like reStructuredText and Markdown. Moreover, I want to be able to write efficiently during my commute, or when in planes. (I don’t fly so often, but when I do, I’d rather make it producitve if I can’t get some sleep.)
I don’t remember how I learned about Jekyll, but it was exactly what I was looking for: a decent blogging system, apparently designed to work with plain text source files. The GitHub Pages integration is the icing on the cake.
First steps with Jekyll
I did a local install of Jekyll using [Stevedore]. I will talk more about Stevedore another time; but to give you an idea, it was as simple as:
jpetazzo@tarrasque:~$ stevedore new jekyll
jpetazzo@tarrasque:~$ stevedore enter jekyll
jpetazzo@stevedore-jekyll:~$ sudo apt-get install -qy ruby1.8 rubygems1.8
[...]
jpetazzo@stevedore-jekyll:~$ sudo gem install jekyll
[...]
jpetazzo@stevedore-jekyll:~$ jekyll new jpetazzo.github.io
jpetazzo@stevedore-jekyll:~$ cd jpetazzo.github.io
jpetazzo@stevedore-jekyll:~/jpetazzo.github.io$ jekyll serve --watch --drafts
[...]
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
Then in a different terminal:
jpetazzo@tarrasque:~$ stevedore url jekyll 4000
http://10.1.1.7:4000/
Then, I essentially started to customize the CSS and HTML templates a little bit, and wrote this.
Once I was happy with the result, I did a git init, added a .gitignore,
committed everything to the appropriate GitHub repository, and there you go!
What’s next?
I will probably tweak the layout a little bit to make it nicer (or less ugly), maybe add some Twitter feed and/or nicer social links; and obviously, write more exciting content!