17 Mar 2015
Having a working Octopress install on Windows 7 was not straightforward
for me. This post outlines the steps I would recommend to have a working
environment.
Important: There are upcoming changes to the whole of the Octopress
‘platform’ so please readup, but while we wait
…
Step 0: Pre-Requisite:
To have the environment going, you’ll need to have
git up and running. But to save yourself the
tears setting up SSH and permission stuff, I recommend you download and
install Github for Windows. This will
provide you with a ‘reliable’ command line interface. The correct paths
for applications readily setup for you.
Step 1: Install Ruby
My working environment used the installer, Ruby
1.9.3-p194
(This might be an outdated version but it works well). Download and
install the package, be sure to tick the check-boxes as shown in the
image below (This will save you “command not found” errors later on)
Step 2: Install The Development Kit
Download
DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.2-20111229-1559-sfx
and extract this to C:/RubyDevKit.
Step 3: Create/ Choose Your Repositories Folder.
Create a folder, something like c:/github. In here we’ll store the files
and folders which make up our blog, configuration files, posts, images,
etc.
Step 4: Setting Up The Environment At The Command Line
Now, using the Git
Shell that was co-installed when you installed GitHub for Windows, run
the following command:
$ cd c:/RubyDevKit
$ ruby dk.rb init
$ ruby dk.rb install
Thats should have the Ruby environment setup for you. Now continue with:
$ cd ..
$ cd c:/github
$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git yourusername.github.io
This clones the octopress repository. Now open the folder you cloned
Octopress to, viz yourusername.github.io. Locate the Gemfile and
using a text editor (I use Notepad++), open the file, replacing
https with http. This is important!
Now do:
$ cd c:/github/yourusername.github.io
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
If, after everything is done the word error does not appear on the
command line, you’re good to go. Still on the command line, continue
with:
This installs the default Octopress theme. I wanted a different
theme,
Justin-Kelly-Theme in particular, so had to run:
$ git clone https://github.com/wallace/justin-kelly-theme.git ./themes/justin-kelly-theme
$ rake install['justin-kelly-theme']
Step 5: Setting Up A Repository on GitHub
You probably already have a GitHub account. Logon to GitHub and create a
repository yourusername.github.io. Never mind the must have README
suggestion by GitHub. Copy your SSH clone URL to a text editor or
clipboard. It is similar to
git@github.com:yourusername/youruserame.github.io.git and you can see
it when you visit your newly created repository. So you should now be
having
https://github.com/yourusername/yourusername.github.io
Go back to the command line and run:
$ rake setup_github_pages
You will be prompted for a url: type
git@github.com:yourusername/youruserame.github.io.git
You can then continue on the command line with:
$ rake generate
$ rake deploy
Opening http://youruserame.github.io in
your browser should land you at your sparkling new blog, albeit, without
content.
Now it’s time for some content creation.
The Octopress Website has excellent
documentation to get you started. So head over there and get blogging.
After several tweaks to my blogging environment, I added a sidebar
twitter widget, Comments via Disqus and Search(Currently in the
works), to have a more appealing blog. Tutorials to do this are
ubiquitous on the web and since i didn’t struggle setting them up I saw
no need to include the howto with this post. I Include references below
for quick access.
“ Parting Quote ”
@erickndava, March 2015
If the problem is IT related in whatever manner, and you can’t seem to
find the solution, it’s probably on the internet - you just have to
google harder for it.
#postscript
> Murky waters. (tl;dr)
After I had initially setup my environment according to the procedure
outlined above, at somepoint evrything just broke. (could have been
some Windows update)I lost my debut post. Tried to setup again using,
Jekyll on Windows. That too had me
in circles of troubleshoot. So I did the whole thing over, following the
procedure here and Voila! I’m back in business.
Why another guide?
I chose Octopress and blogging on GitHub over other ‘easier’ methods for
a few reasons:
- This becomes my gentle introduction to git and GitHub
- I like to be in ‘control’, viz I enjoy seeing cogs of a technology/
implementation moving.
13 Mar 2015
On Names
So, I decided to start a blog and I picked a name - neaRThings, my
succinct version of Tobler’s first law of
geography,
should reflect the domain I am passionate about - ‘geo’ and atleast,
well, be intriguing enough.
Nowadays people don’t have time for verbose articles and I’m glad
you’re on the third sentence already! My few professional years have led
me to realise that
tinkerers make
things happen. I watched the Leaflet Mapping
library grow from being just a speck on GitHub
to the time it took on the Google Maps
API. I
also witnessed MapBox hire this Leaflet
dude as I
watched them evolve since I was following them closely because of
TileMill.(Evolved to Mapbox Studio)
Tinkering gives one an edge, with contentment, without the restrain of
structured seminars, classroom lessons or guided training. As a tinkerer
I can quit when I want to (rarely) without feeling guilty about it.
Research while troubleshooting, opens up (often unwanted) divergent
paths from the task at hand and the tools, technologies and tutorials
stumbled upon end up being appended to an ever growing ~ TODO!
Hencefrom
I learned about QGIS when it was still 0.7 (It’s at
2.8 at the date of writing this article), I was just about to leave
varsity then, later ditched the prospects of becoming a Land Surveyor
post graduation after having been made to wait the whole day by the
would-be-mentor, only to be told to come back the next day. The first
GIS related job was with an institution that had spreadsheets for a Land
Information System - I was heart broken. This was nothing near what had
been said in the interview and fell far short of what I had read from
ArcUser Magazines at college. A few
years later I met a mentor like no other, Johann Groenewald of
Tracks4Africa. He led me on a
teach-yourself path and gave me room to do it. I discovered QGIS again
and PostGIS as well this time. Things have not
been the same since.
(Aside: you may want to readup of T4A products and check out their
Africa Map. Their business
model still befuddles me. )
Along the way I discovered
gis.stackexchange.com and jumped onto
twitter. I was already faithfully
following geobloggers amongst them James
Fee - for starters, then the list
grew to warrant the use of Feedly and not
unparsable bookmarks in the browser. During my regular reading I bumbed
into a statement that almost described my situation and led to serious
introspection. It was by Paul Ramsey on his
blog.
“…a career where 90% of the activity is actually in data creation
(digitization monkey!) and publication (map monkey!), not in
analysis…”
It was an eye opener regarding where I wanted to be professionally. Ever
since I have been endeavouring to conform to the
Spatial-IT padigm.I also
took to heart the advice he gives in one of his presentations:
“Learn something new or hard. Learn something uncomfortable.”
And that was not the last on the matter as I kept coming across similar
thought provoking and spurring tweets:
Well, I had left varsity thinking spatial was special!
Henceto
Direct thyself.
From the one and many blog posts I have read. I drew the conclusion -
the best way to learn a technology, programming language or tool, is to
be handson with it. Get to do some project with it. Thus the
direction I am taking is to learn as much as I can through projects that
come to my mind … light bulb moments.
Another Blog?
The day job doesn’t necessarily task me enough in the directions of the
many tools and technologies out there. Sufficient for a day’s work are
the tools in the office. For diversity I choose to waddle the “forest”.
On this blog I intend to share my thoughts and experiences. Several
posts on career development I’ve read up on recommend blogging for
various reasons. I decided the following were relevant to me:
-
Improve my writing skills. - I like poetry and ‘twisted’
english. So I will see how much of that can be used in technical
writings. Metaphors say?
-
Cement the things I learn. - By writing down procedures, that
forces one to think about it, cementing the concepts in the head and
hopefully birthing alternative approaches.
-
Re-share what I have Read-up - rewrite what I would have
learnt. Often I have used steps of ‘how-to’ from more than one blog
post to get something right! Let others rediscover it. So I see no
harm in having three pseudo-identical articles on the web.
What Tree?
Yes, I am using the Windows Operating system. I have had my stint with
Linux, did 101 data recoveries from broken
Windows. At one time I became an OS ethusiast, carrying around several
distros on 3.5 inch floppy disks. I even damned the machines I was using
daily, calling them Windoze.The revolutionalism got me nowhere! The food
on my table and the railment I gait in, have been earned from spending
atleast 8 hours a day using this operating system. Working against it
doesn’t help but rather with it. Regardless, I can presently fire-off
Ubuntu off my
VirtualBox installation. To add to my
consolation, one of the
‘geo’-bloggers I read after
makes continued use shameless.
(Aside: At one point in my career I had to unistall Ubuntu from 30 PCs
or so to install a Windows OS just because the adoption of OpenOffice
and such just couldn’t happen. It was retrogressive to try and enforce
it.)
In The Meantime
off to a project on GitHub for Geo - the thought “I need to learn
JavaScript fast”, dogging my path after 2014 end of year
geo-discussions, a turf
call!
“ Parting Quote ”
@briantimoney,
April 2012
Learning spatial SQL may not help getting a $45K job now, but is
critical to getting a $85K job three years from now.
#postscript
The cost (gain) of the first post
It has been the ascent, albeit slow, of steep and slippery learning
curves and unfamiliar terittory. There was serious tyre-kicking just
to get the framework properly set-up - git, Ruby, ruby-gems… had to
resort to using GitHub for Windows when
SSH keys and things became a tangle while setting up git (command line).
Setting up Ruby was toughest, top-hit Google Search Octopress setup
tutorials led me into infinite loops of troubleshooting. After weeks of
trying, I had to do the whole Ruby setup ‘thing’ all over after finding
this excellent and straight forward article on the
matter. In a
nutshell tools and apps that were used:
- Octopress - [Tool] Setting up,
customising for font, but then git was a pre-requisite!
- GIT - [Technology] The tears and sweat
of ensuring it installed and was working.
- Markdown - [Language]
Learning the language. Luckily Cheatsheets made it easier.
- SublimeText - [Tool] Learning the
Keyboard shortcuts. Searching for useful plugins. Must say
OmniMarkupPreviewer
did come in very handy while editing the blog post
Well, I must say the temptation to dump the Octopress path and go for
WordPress (on Openshift) was great at one time but I prevailed.
Tinkerers tinker until it works!
