Experimenting with GitHub, Jekyll and autobuilding web pages

Using github to publish a blog

I have been thinking for awhile that I should start posting some general musings on scientific visualization, renewable energy, and the application of #tech4good.

So far, however, I have been stymied by the myriad of different workflows. It seems like everyone has something to say, and there are a zillion tools. Should I use Wordpress? a Medium account? something else?

All of the existing solutions feel super heavy weight for simple note-taking and observations, so I decided to follow the good example of @lagerratrobe and just start writing stuff up in markdown and publishing on GitHub.

This has a few advantages that I prefer over the other systems:

1. It is very lightweight, and Markdown is easy to take fast notes and then transfer to blog format.
2. This gets me into GitHub, practicing some skills that have gone stale with age (version control. branches. loads of other useful features)
3. I has the bonus of giving me something new to learn, as it is hosted in Jekyll, and is an easy first step to auto-built web content.
4. I can run Jekyll locally to learn the ins/outs and then publish on commit, which is a good workflow to remember.

We’ll see how it goes, but for now has taken only a morning to configure and it looks to be as powerful as I really need for such a simple project. It feels very nice to be back at the commandline instead of the WordPress console (yeah, I’m sure I could use a wordpress commandline interface, but can’t really be bothered to learn that just yet!)