A Blog Is Born

Published on Sunday, 14 December 2014

So I've decided to start a blog, not for the first time, I've had a few attempts on a couple of different platforms from a custom web app to Umbraco and I've probably got stuff on Geeks with Blogs and Blogger too. This time I'm going for an Octopress and GitHub Pages combo and I know little of either! Thankfully both are fairly well documented and hopefully be able to learn a few things along the way.

This first post will hopefully detail how to get started, [SPOILER ALERT] I guess if you are reading this then this has proven to be successful. I'm using my trusty Surface Pro running Windows 10 Tech Preview so a good starting point looks to be How to Install and Use Octopress on Windows so let's see how this goes.

1. Getting the basics installed

To get started we'll need a couple of things installed and Chocolatey is the best place to start this process! Once installed (or updated in my case) the following packages should be installed:

  • choco install git
  • choco install ruby -version 1.9.3.54500
  • choco install ruby.devkit
  • choco install python

2. Install Octopress

Once everything is installed and the command prompt is restarted lets get Octopress installed, configured and deployed.

  • git init
  • git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git nyami.github.io
  • cd nyami.github.io
  • gem install bundler
  • bundle install
  • rake install
  • notepad .\_config.yml and update properties and save
  • echo www.nyami.uk >> source/CNAME
  • rake new_post["A Blog Is Born"]
  • rake generate
  • rake preview
  • rake setup_github_pages[https://github.com/Nyami/nyami.github.io.git]

at this point I got the following error:

## Set the codepage to 65001 for Windows machines
** Invoke setup_github_pages (first_time)
** Execute setup_github_pages
rake aborted!
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
C:/GitHub/nyami.github.io/Rakefile:393:in `strip'
C:/GitHub/nyami.github.io/Rakefile:393:in `blog_url'
C:/GitHub/nyami.github.io/Rakefile:344:in `block in <top (required)>'

using the command chcp 65001 at this point didn't help so I had a quick peek at "Rakefile" not really knowing what it is but the problem looked to be around the CNAME file created above so I changed the encoding to ANSI and tried again and this time it was successful.

Now I'm going to try get this up on Github... lets see what happens...

Update So looks like everything worked using the following workflow:

  • git add .
  • git commit -m "first commit of Octopress blog"
  • rake deploy
  • git push origin source

This was surprisingly easy, hopefully over the next few months I'll get some new posts up...