Mixing in some Tech

Just when I was about to get started to write , I realized that most often I write in the same date pattern. Hmm…

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Anyways, let’s get started into this kind-of-new thing where I’ll try to mix some technical blogs into this site, you know, on the lighter note. For some serious articles visit my Hashnode site. Maybe start with how to exactly replicate this blog site.

Ruby and Jekyll

Ruby is a language. Just like C or Javascript. And Jekyll is a static-site generator written in Ruby. To have a little analogy, consider Jekyll as a package, just like we have in Python and JS. For Ruby, a package is called a gem. So Jekyll is a gem that helps us to create statically generated sites within minutes.

Static-Sites

So normally, when you use a CDN (Content Delivery System), the data (say blog) is fetched from a different server rather than the same server that presents you the web page. Which isn’t a bad choice. That is what I used earlier to design this site. But since I’m not so good at UI, and also considering the benefits of static-sites, I chose this. Static sites automatically create an HTML page for you beforehand, so that you can bypass the CDN route. And since I was more likely to write a blog that didn’t actually need a CDN for, I chose this.

Why Jekyll?

Ready-made, responsive themes are available as templates to use. Modify it a little and you are good to go!

Building it actually

Assuming you have Ruby and Git installed in your system and a GitHub account, let’s make a copy of this Chirpy theme template from GitHub. Just visit this site and select Use this template option.

choose the option Use This template

Create a new repository and the entire content will be copied to the repository for your use!

create a new repository

Setting the local development server

Just copy the address of your newly created repository and head to the terminal.

mkdir chirpy-blog
cd chirpy-blog
git clone <YOUR_COPIED_URL_ADDRESS>
cd chirpy-starter

After you are done with the clone and moved to the directory, just run the commands (Hoping that bundler must be installed in your system. If not just run sudo gem install bundler)

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

And if everything proceeds correctly (fingers crossed 🤞🤞), you may see the message that server running correctly on port 4000!

Move to your browser and go over localhost:4000 to see the site running.

Note: If you accidently encounter any dependency issues (I did), it mostly would be because of wrong ruby version used. Instead use rvm and use the specific version using rvm install <VERSION_NUMBER>

Writing a new blog post

Simple! See the folder name _posts inside the chirpy-starter folder? Create a new file named in the following covention:

YYYY-MM-DD-Title-for-your-blog.md

Once created, move to the file and copy the following content into it.

---
title: hello world!
author: Papa Jones
categories: [CATEGORY, SUB_CATEGORY]
description: My first blog post!
comments: false
pin: true
image: <RELATIVE_PATH_FROM_ROOT_DIRECTORY>
tags: ['tag1', 'tag2', 'tag3']     # TAG names should always be lowercase
---

# Hello World!

This is my first blog post!

Save the file and voila! A new blog post would automatically be created for you!

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If you have actually READ it, and trying to really make one, and stuck at someplace, I’m glad to help :)