Well. I finally got around to putting this old website together. It took a little while to work out where I wanted to host it, but I always had an inkling that GitHub Pages would be a good place to start. This blog is “powered” by Jekyll which, for a non-programmer like me, can easily become an uncomfortably daunting run through Ruby installs, Jekyll gems and terminal windows. But thanks to a fantastic guide from Jonathan McGlone, called “Using GitHub to Create and Host a Personal Website” 1, I learned that it was feasible to set things up natively in GitHub (using GitHub Desktop and Atom). From previous typings and jottings, I’m used to Markdown editors like iA Writer (thankfully now available on Windows and Android as well as Mac & iOS), so I can use those to author my posts, then, with a minimum of publishing work and tagging, paste them into Atom and up onto the Web.
The basic setup was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be - but images proved to be a big hurdle. GitHub provides a count of “commits”, so how often the repository has been updated: I needed 69 commits to get this far. I tried all sorts of formats and syntaxes, from using double dots ‘..’ to full urls with ‘master’ and ‘blob’ in them - but, as you can see, I got there in the end.
In addition to McGlone’s guide, I made use of the kramdown reference guide2 and the GitHub guide to mastering Markdown3
Testing Testing 1,2,3:
See, I got there in the end. So - having renamed this entry from “A Test Post” to “A First Post”, I’m good to go, ready to dive more deeply into this strange and apparently useless world of philosophy in engineering. Or, put another way, I no longer have technical tinkering as an excuse not to proceed further with real thinking…