Blogging via a text-editor and Git with jekyll

Share the beneficial knowledge, tips, howtos with least effort. Write a text file (in markdown or textile) with your favorite text editor (gedit, emacs, vim, etc) then use git to commit and push it to your server. Jekyll blog generator provides that possibility.

After using Git on Ubuntu happily for quite a while, I was really happy to write and maintian my whole site with nanoc using markdown, I was still using pebble as my blog server and I searched quite a while for something like nanoc that was built for a blog, finally I found Jekyll. It just requires that you run its command in a folder with the right content - get an example site source then extract it in a folder then run jekyll, it would generate the blog in the _site folder. All the rest of the info is there at Jekyll project on github.

A few things worth sharing:

• I dont know if this is unique to lighttpd or not, but links to folders that start with a / wont work so I needed to change all occurances of its liquid template post.url to post.url | remove_first:'/'
• use full path to the css in the default.html in the layout - I’m using Tom’s template
• The layout’s post.html “related posts” generated links were broken, I needed to prefix its url with ../../../../ (four steps since I’m using categories too).
• I wrote/used a little ruby program to migrate all my old blog entries from pebble xml content files.

For the git pull post-update hook that worked on a Ubuntu server, here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
#SHELL=/bin/bash
#PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
#MAILTO=root
#HOME=/
unset GIT_DIR && cd /YourFolderWhichYouGitCloneLocally && git pull

(thanks to http://www.taknado.com/en/2009/03/26/deploying-a-jekyll-generated-site/ for the unset GIT_DIR fix)

For info about how to setup git on your server see this article on scie.nti.st.

To sum it up, I really think jekyll is a great contribution to the world - as it makes sharing good knowledge via blogging much easier so, hopefully, more good knowledge can be shared for the benefit of mankind. Much thanks to the developers of Jekyll and Git!