Started Github pages

I had several blogs in the past that i normally tend to ignore and stop writing, so this one will be a simple tech/personal blog with entries that i might find useful in the future to search quicker.

And as any normal blog i would start by writing the procedure of deploying the blog itself.

The only way i would keep this thing updated is if i have very quick way to edit via terminal a Markdown file and do a command like post-it and that’s it.

So hexo seems like a good solution for me.

Gonna try this one out.

So first things first, hosting. I’m cheap bastard so i don’t have cool domain yet, and i just need some git repo for the blog.

Lets stick with GitHub Pages there git service is pretty awesome so lets try this one out.

Mental-Note-To-Self: Get some nice english corrector ;)

So i’ve just created a new repo in github and from the settings i’ve selected to build a standard GitHub Page.

cloned the dam thing to my computer

git clone git@github.com:rramos/rramos.github.io.git

Installing Hexo

So first things first, let’s install the requirements.

It requires:

• Node
• Git

Well, git i already have since a cloned the repo.
Node must be installed, but since i’m using Ubuntu Xenial i need to install the legacy one.

sudo apt install nodejs-legacy

Now starting to install hexo via npm.

sudo npm install -g hexo-cli
sudo npm install hexo-deployer-git --save

Ok that’s it.

Start writing

So i’ve run the following command on the repo, this initiates the hexo page structure.

hexo init

I’ve added the deploy configuration in _config.yml

deploy:
  type: git
  repo: git@github.com:rramos/rramos.github.io.git
  branch: master

I also downloaded a very simple theme, cas’m a simple guy.

cd themes
git clone https://github.com/lotabout/very-simple

Thanks @lotabout for the theme by the way.

And installed the theme requirements

git clone https://github.com/lotabout/very-simple themes/very-simple
sudo npm install hexo-renderer-sass --save
sudo npm install hexo-renderer-jade --save

Writing

So … now i suppose i can start creating blog entries, let’s start.

hexo new post "Created rramos.github.io"

I get the output where the md file is and start writing there.

After i have made sure my ssh keys where registered on github i simply deployed with

hexo deploy

And voilá: https://rramos.github.io is up and running.

Final touches

So hexo only dumps the public part of the blog which makes sense to the git repo. But i want to include all the source and not have separated repositories for that.

I’ve created a src dir and copy all the source data there, now i can edit directly that repo, let’s take that advantage and remove the default hello world page from the structure guess there might exist a command for that.

$ hexo list post
INFO  Start processing
Date        Title                     Path                                Category  Tags
2016-09-17  Created rramos.github.io  _posts/Created-rramos-github-io.md
2016-09-18  Hello World               _posts/hello-world.md

There you are you bastard hello-world, lets get ride of you.

hexo clean
rm source/_posts/hello-world.md
hexo generate

Well guess that’s it. There is a lot to explore in hexo from what i can tell, need to check the documentation and understand the community envolvment. Also a quick way to add imagens and other objects and define the quick way to deploy.

Separate public from source

It turns out that have the source and public data in the same repo causes some issues on the updates. The best approach seems to have a separate repo for the source data and the official Github Pages or other hosting service with git for the public part.

I’ve also added in this source repo a .gitignore with

public
db.json
.deploy_git

So now i just have to edit MarkDown hexo generate and hexo deploy, seems quick enough let’s see if this time i can keep this updated.

Cheers,
RR