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Hey Siri, Restore My Blog

31 Dec 2021

I’ve been on-again-mostly-off-again with writing blog posts. It’s always been entirely for myself, mostly to record information somewhere that I will find it again when I need it. This is the latest version of that, having been in an off-again mode for five years or so. With some of the things I want to work on and think about in the coming year I’d like to try on-again.

In terms of behind-the-scenes I want something simple and markdown based. And, ultimately I want to migrate my earlier posts from two earlier blogs here to consolidate into a single place. (Originally I used SquareSpace and blogged at henrysmac. Later I had a markdown based blog hosted on heroku, but the system that was running on was deprecated also and I need to find a new solution.) Based on some notes I wrote to myself 5+ years ago and some quick googling, I’m going to try a Github based jekyll blog.

The following is how I made things work on a 2021 14” MacBook Pro M1 Max running MacOS 12.1 Monterey.

Toward getting a local Jekyll install working:

To install Jekyll in the following I am working through these instructions:

ruby -v returned ruby 2.6.8p205, so the built-in ruby should have been new enough (>=2.5), but I ran into problems using it. So, will install ruby 3 with homebrew instead.

Run the following in a terminal (note that we are creating a local to the project zshrc file that we will source each time we want to work here. This is to avoid stepping on the system ruby installation.)

cd ~/sites/henryroe.github.io
echo 'export SDKROOT=$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)' > zshrc
source zshrc
brew install ruby
echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/bin:/opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/3.0.0/bin:$HOME/.gem/ruby/3.0.0/bin $PATH"' >> zshrc
echo 'export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/lib"' >> zshrc
echo 'export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/include"' >> zshrc
source zshrc

Add and commit the zshrc file to GitHub:

gem install --user-install bundler
gem install --user-install jekyll

Now to set up the initial jekyll site in order to preview it locally. (following along here) The following assumes opening a new terminal window, though you don’t have to:

cd ~/sites/henryroe.github.io
source zshrc
jekyll new --skip-bundle --force .

Open Gemfile that jekyll created and:

then:

bundle install
bundle add webrick
bundle install

Now launch and check the site locally (can be in terminal window):

cd ~/sites/henryroe.github.io
source zshrc
bundle exec jekyll serve

Now, can open http://127.0.0.1:4000/ in a local browser window! And, once have committed back into GitHub, can view the same on GitHub at https://henryroe.github.io.

Install a theme

I decided I wanted my new blog to look a lot like my most recent heroku-based blog, which was based on the “BlackDoc” Jekyll theme. Here are my notes:

Looking online the basic version of blackdoc in its github form doesn’t work with github pages. There is a forked version that itself has forks for github pages and running locally. (Found from these notes.)

I pulled down copies of both of those forked versions and hacked them together into a single version that works both locally for testing and on github pages for deployment. The key being to insert a bunch of if statements like:

  <meta name="msapplication-config" content="/assets/favicons/browserconfig.xml">

I then migrated over a bunch of the style edits I’d made to the old Heroku-served blog. The end result is what you see here. (And can see the source files of here.)

And, being Markdown based, it was incredibly easy to migrate over the posts from my earlier heroku-based version of this blog.

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