Most Blogs start by a report on how to get started with blogging. This blog should not be any different. Not that it is particularly interesting, but maybe someone else out there has the same difficulties that I had and maybe these lines can help getting over those difficulties a little faster.

History

Before coming here I started a blog using Evernote linked to Postach.io. This was very convenient, because I use Evernote on a daily basis. When writing a post about programming concepts, I want to follow the paradigm of reproducible research or reproducible programming, i.e., no copy-pasting of code and results. Everything is produced by one single source file. At the time when I got started with my Evernote blog I did not see how to implement the strategy of reproducible programming.

Goal

As mentioned above, the goal for my ideal blogging environment was to write one source file with everything and then have some clever system produce all the output that was desired. I was reading some blog posts about blogging like a hacker reference needed here and thereby I found using GitHub pages was what I wanted.

GitHub

GitHub offers free hosting of custom web-sites through GitHub pages. All one has to do is

  1. create an account on GitHub and
  2. within that account create a repository called <username>.github.io where <username> is to be replaced by the actual username you chose for the GitHub account.

After these two steps, your blog web-site is available at username.github.io.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a blog-aware static site generator which means documents in Markdown format are automatically conterted into static HTML pages. Furthermore, running Jekyll on your local machine gives you the possibility to serve every page locally without having to upload anything.

Poole

Poole provides an example setup for a Jekyll site. It comes with a set of templates, pages, styles and posts. This is very convenient for any beginner, because all one has to do is clone the sources provided by Poole, change the content to its own site and a new blog-site is ready to be served in only a very short time.