Creating My Github Pages Blog With Octopress

Hi there, let me introduce myself. I am Rendy, currently working at Human Network Labs. We help connect me, you and everything around us with my precise positioning technology. Ever since Github introduced Pages, I wanted to start my product management and technology blog. Today I finally found some time to work on it.

One of the ways to create Github Pages is to use Jekyll, a static site generator that generates a static version of the blog. Instead of using a dynamic scripting language (such as PHP, Python) that renders your blog posts as you load the website. Jekyll generate an html only version of your site.

Since I am new to Jekyll, I did a quick search for ways to get started and I found Octopress a blogging framework for Github Pages! Very well documented, following the instructions are a breeze except for one problem during bundle install.

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ravi@taraka:sudo gem install RedCloth
[sudo] password for ravi: 
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing RedCloth:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': cannot load     such file -- mkmf (LoadError)
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
    from extconf.rb:1:in `<main>'

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/RedCloth-4.2.9 for     inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/RedCloth-    4.2.9/ext/redcloth_scan/gem_make.out

Solution:

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sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev

To get started with Octopress, you need to install Git and Ruby. If you are not a Ruby programmer I will recommed the light-weight and more flexible rbenv instead of RVM.

This is how a blog post look like in Jekyll:

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---
title: Title Of Post
layout: post
date:
comments: true
categories:
---
Simple markdown syntax. *italic*, **bold**, [click here](http://github.com), #header1, ##header2 etc.

To conclude a day’s work. I highly recommend all programmers who have interest to showcare their work to be on Github Pages.