Full Meta Jacket

I originally considered reappropriating my Github page into a blog, but it became obvious that doing so would not scale easily. So I researched some other solutions (e.g. Wordpress, Ghost, Medium), but seeing as I was already using gh-pages I might as well use Jekyll. Plus, I am learning Ruby, so setting up Jekyll was like killing two birds with one stone :).¹

I worked with this apposite guide and found the experience pretty quick and painless, hitting only three bumps preventing me from running jekyll serve --watch in my shell (Git Bash with MinGW port of *nix tools). Yeah, I was using my Windows 7 laptop, but it happened to have another required dependency: Python.

After installing Ruby 2.2.2 with RubyInstaller, the first hitch I encountered was during bundle install which complained about re-running with Ruby DevKit, so I followed DevKit’s quick start instructions. There was a note from html-pipeline about bundling Filter gem dependencies, but after a quick search that appeared to be benign. Since everything else seemed to be in order, I happily ran jekyll new myblog which created this blog (I have since restructured the repository). I then tried to start up Jekyll locally with jekyll serve --watch but it complained about a liquid header exception, and then a hitimes versioning issue. I diligently followed those two steps and was finally able to navigate to home sweet home. My site also responded to changes in the watched directories without requiring the wdm gem, so yay!