Well, this is my first blog here (right now on github).

I’m using the Octopress as blog content management, and I will briefly describe the way to set it up.

First, go to Octopress setup page. Follow the instruction, install the dependencies that Octopress will need.

Then choose the platform that the blog will be hosted on, here is a link for deploying github pages. Note: an error occured while I followed the instruction to rake it.

rake aborted!
You have already activated rake 10.1.0, but your Gemfile requires rake 0.9.6.
Prepending `bundle exec` to your command may solve this.
/Users/Haochen/myBlog/octopress/Rakefile:2:in `<top (required)>'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

This error could be easily solved by adding bundle exec in front of the rake command.

After rake generate, go to ‘_deploy’ folder, and type git pull origin master. Then type rake deploy. Otherwise, there will be some errors:

error: failed to push some refs to 'git@gihub.com:your github page repo'

Now, your blog page is on-line. Although the pages are hosted on github, you still need version control on your Octopress settings, so don’t forget to commit to the ‘source’ branch.

git add .
git commit -m 'your message'
git push origin source

I’d rather put them into a bash file git_commit_source.sh, rather than typing every time

!/bin/bash
git add . &&
git commit -m "$1" && #first argument will be the commit message
git push origin source

To generate a blog page, you could use rake new_post['blog name']. However, as I mentioned before the rake command wouldn’t work properly if the ruby version didn’t match. We could use bundle exec rake to run the command. Moreover, if you are using zsh shell, you should also add noglob in front of these command, because symbol ‘[‘ and ‘]’ are reserved in zsh for regular expression.

Finally, my blog is here. Much easier than I expected. Using Octopress can save your time on setting a blog site, and it generates pages automatically.

This blog is still underconstruction. I would like to make it more simple and pretty. K.I.S.S

Update (several minutes later): Encountered a problem of creating single page, e.g. 404.html. The command rake new-page['404'] cannot work on zsh due to ‘[]’ is converted. Hence, the only way to add cutomize page is to write a markdown file and put into ‘source’ fold. But, do not forget to add the following to the head of page:

---
layout: page
title: "Super Awesome"
date: 2011-07-03 5:59
comments: true
sharing: true
footer: true
---

Update (2014-Mar-12): rake preview has problem with Safari. Don’t know why but only show blank page while open http://localhost:4000 . Using Chrome or Firefox will solve this.[ref]

Due to save typing, I have written some bash files (deploy.sh and preview.sh):

#!/bin/bash

bundle exec rake generate &&
bundle exec rake deploy

#!/bin/bash

# set up the octopress preview
# open http://localhost:4000 in Chrome
# Safari has some wired error in it

# if previous preview is running, stop it
preview_pid=`/bin/ps -fu $USER| grep "rake\ preview" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{print $2}'`
kill -2 $preview_pid

bundle exec rake generate &&
bundle exec rake preview &

sleep 5 # wait a while to make sure the preview already running

#change the browser command if you are using a different OS and browser
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome 'http://localhost:4000'

pidof "Google Chrome" | xargs wait
preview_pid=`/bin/ps -fu $USER| grep "rake\ preview" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{print $2}'`
kill -2 $preview_pid
#echo "$preview_pid"
echo "Preview DONE!"

Please ignore the text below, the latest code fixes all of them. :P

Warnning: This preview shell script may not work for you if you are a ruby developer, or you are using some programs written or depended in/on ruby or ruby packages, because it killed all ruby processes at the end. Do not forget to fully quit Chrome (Comman+q in MacOS) before starting a new preview, otherwise unknown error would occur (duplicate processes).

BTW, the preview.sh also left a messy terminal for you. Well, everything have side effects. But you could add clear command at the end of the script, if you don’t really care about the traces.