I always wanted to write blog posts in an easy way. For me, this means staying in my development environment which I’m already used to and writing it in AsciiDoc. Previously I did already publish the list of my talks and upcoming conferences on this page, which you can still find in the Talks section of this site.

When I asked other people at conferences how they write their blogs, most of them recommended Jekyll. While it’s very easy to setup Jekyll (even on Windows) it took me some time to find a theme which I actually like. I’m not sure I will keep this one, but this blocked me for such a long time that I just chose one today to get started.

I’m mostly a Java developer, so expect a lot of Java and Java conference related blog post. Occasionally I’m using other languages like Javascript, C#, VBA as well. Whenever I feel like this could be interesting for others, I will share it here.

Now this distracted me for quite a while and I forgot to order my sushi for after today’s Werder Bundesliga match.

Install steps

Here are the basic setup steps, which are very simple and are just here to make them easy to find for me in case I need them again:

sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

  • Install (check versions in original install instructions)

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.3 ruby2.3-dev build-essential
sudo gem update
sudo gem install jekyll bundler

  • Check if its running

jekyll -v

  • Create the blog:

jekyll new blog --skip-bundle`
cd blog

  • Choose a theme from http://jekyllthemes.org/

  • Follow install steps for the theme, in my case whiteglass

  • Use your favourite editor to change the files. Currently I’m using atom with the following additional packages:

    • asciidoc-preview

    • autocomplete-asciidoc

    • language-asciidoc

  • I like to use Asciidoc to write my blog posts, so I needed to configure jekyll-asciidoc

  • Install LiveReload Add-On in the browser

  • (Make sure blog is compatible with Github Pages. Not relevant right now, as I have to build site myself to be able to use Asciidoc.)

Write a new blog post

  • Create a new file in _posts folder with filename year-month-day-title.adoc (or _drafts folder without a date for future posts)

= Welcome to my blog
:page-layout: post
:page-liquid: true
:page-category: jekyll

  • Activate Atom Editor Preview (Ctrl+Shift+A)

  • Build Preview. This will also do incremental builds when saving files.

sudo bundle install
sudo bundle exec jekyll serve
OR
sudo bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts
sudo bundle exec jekyll build

Coming back after some time:

  • Open command prompt and type: bash

  • Upgrade:

sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo gem update
sudo bundle install

Update 27.05.2018

If gem update times out, IPv6 might be the cause.

Try pinging the named host and add the IP to /etc/hosts or disable IPv6.