How I wrote my first post ?

Mar 01, 2015

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” . Maya Angelou

I’m a programmer, I believe that a good programmer should have a blog. This week I made the decision to write my first post, before start writing, i had to answer some questions :

  • What should I blog about ?
  • which blogging platform to use ?

##Blogging about …?

This was the most difficult question to answer, as I thought for a long time that I have no good things share …

was wrong all the time, and what’s obvious to me could be amazing for others <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xcmI5SSQLmE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So blogging about ….

Blog about ...

Every programming experiments I do, every new software notion I learn or I wish to learn. Also On my daily job , I face problems that take me time to solve, so I will write posts describing how I solved them. I will write posts about every idea that found its path to my mind.

Ghost, Medium, Blogger,… which blogging platform to use ?

I start my day with reading what’s new on Hacker News, most of them are posts on blog hosted on platforms , like Medium, svbtle, Blogger, ghost. each one of the themes has pros and cons that I will not details here .

I made a short list of what features I need .

  • Free hosting ☺ .
  • Programmer friendly : allow to write code with features like , formatting, syntax highlighting…
  • Simple and minimalist
  • Easy and powerful customization
  • Allow to write fast and publishing faster.

Jekyll with github pages as the free hosting solution are the best choice for me .

Start Blogging

Create the blog

Github gives a simple and easy to follow step by step guide to create your blog, I had just follow the guide.

Install Jekyll

Installation of Jekyll is a simple task unless you are a windows user like me .

  • Download and install Ruby from Ruby Installer
  • Download and install Ruby Devkit from Ruby Dev Kit
  • Extract the Dev kit zip to a local directory, and add it to the windows PATH variable.
  • Open up a command prompt and type :
 gem install Bundle

If you have this error

 ERROR:  While executing gem (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)
    U+2019 to CP850 in the conversion from UTF-16LE to UTF-8 to CP850.

don’t panic , just type

 chcp 1252

and then re-execute the previous command.

  • Execute
Bundle --version

to verify if all went well .

Structure of the Blog

I took these list of Sites using Jekyll , as a starting point to understand how I should structure my blog and some best practices to apply.

I got especially inspired by the blog of Rasmus Andersson(Source)

Layouts :

Layouts allow you to define a structure and used as I want with just a declaration .

I defined two Layouts :

  • the default layout for the page (header , footer ,sidebars, comments section) .
  • the post layout for the post ,that include the default layout.

code source

Includes :

I used these feature , to include google analytics code and disqus comments engine

Code source

Write the first post

Once the structure of the blog is well defined, all that’s left is to print my ideas in a text format that Jekyll and GitHub can render to obtain what you are seeing and reading right now .

“I believe that there is always the other way to do it, and I hope that you let me know .”