Moving My blog to github

Self-evidently this blog is now at github.io; and I may point one of the domains I own at it in due course. I’ve moved some recent posts and things that they link to over to the new platform and will continue to backfill with interesting posts which seem worth keeping. The the old blog address https://jamesone111.wordpress.com will stay online. Microsoft have kept the old posts I wrote while I was there, although they have been rehomed, so content, however badly proof-read, sticks around forever; there’s a special kind of embarrassment in finding a spelling or editing error which has been on-line for a decade.

Better proofing is one reason for moving. I’m typing in Word, with the Writage Extension, so, I get all the benefits of working in my everyday word processor. Then I save-as markdown. Somewhere markdown has just become the easy way to put basic pages together. Twenty-something years of doing raw HTML when I need to hasn’t gone to waste, because, when I have what I want to say, I move over to Visual Studio Code to finish the markdown. Code drives git for me and Uploading to GitHub was the second reason for moving. I have been using Live writer for ages, and it felt clunkier as time passed, but finally logon to WordPress broke, I think Writer uses obsolete levels of security which WordPress have now turned off. Inserting formatted PowerShell into Writer was one of the last things where I still needed Windows PowerShell’s ISE, I was using a 2009 version of IsePack, to copy highlighted text as HTML it’s cumbersome - needing a switch from a WYSIWYG editor to raw HTML and back again; now I can work on a post and a script in the same editor, and just mark it to be code or better, to be highlighted as PowerShell (or whatever else I need). And the last reason for moving was I got tired of the junk WordPress adds to my pages; use their platform and accept their junk, I guess. Or move. I like the new look so far.

GitHub automatically publishes from a repository to github.io. All I needed to do was add a repo named <<mygithubUsername>>.github.io and, out of sight, Jekyll does the rest. There is plenty to read on-line about Jekyll: installing it locally means you can build the same site locally that will get built on GitHub, test it with a simple local web-server and upload when you’re happy with how it looks.
I followed the instructions I found here including his steps for setting up Ruby (you don’t need the full the development environment), and editing the \_config.yml file –filling in obvious placeholders in there.

Editing in VS Code, it made sense to be able call Jeyyll to process everything and start the web-site. I don’t often use the “Terminal/Build” menu option in VS code but I setup a command for this with a tasks.JSON file:

  {
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "jekyll serve",
            "type": "process",
            "command": "C:\\Ruby27-x64\\bin\\ruby.exe",
            "args": [
                {"value": "C:\\Ruby27-x64\\bin\\jekyll"},
                {"value": "serve"}
            ],
            "problemMatcher": [],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        }
    ]
  }

And as you can see, Jekyll can do syntax formatting for many file types. And I will need to wrap a lot of my samples in
{% highlight powershell %} ... {% endhighlight %} so I added snippets to VS code for High Light Powershell and End High Light,

{
    "highlight PS": {
        "scope": "markdown",
        "prefix": "hlp",
        "body": [
            "{% highlight powershell %}"
        ]
    },
    "end highlight": {
        "scope": "markdown",
        "prefix": "ehl",
        "body": [
            "{% endhighlight %}"
        ]
    }
}

Next, I had a browse through http://jekyllthemes.org/ for a theme and settled on Monochrome. I’ve made some small customizations to it, changing how links render and changing the syntax.scss to colour different elements of PowerShell correctly; much back-and-forth was needed between the developer tools in the browser finding which class had been selected for an element, a paint program to pick up the colour used in VSCode with the ISE colour scheme, and the CSS file to put that colour in for that class.

Monochrome has its own shortcut icon and I decided I’d use the little avatar I drew years ago at https://www.sp-studio.de/ so I dropped that in and edited the head.html file to point to it. SP Studio is still on-line and is being ported off Flash, and it served as a reminder that I should make a donation to keep it going.

I didn’t yet have the sharing links at the bottom of the page and a bit more searching brought me to another great set of instructions. I added some extra links to the resylting include file, using a couple of tips from a rather older page, including the code for Previous page / Next page and the idea of using GitHub Issues for blog feedback.

As I was building these, I was moving about three dozen posts over, converting about 45,000 words to markdown (maybe I need to write shorter ones) and figuring out where actual HTML was needed. Jekyll can support ‘ordinary’ html, so I could have kept the original files, but it was a quick way to understand what the platform could do, and how bits worked. Whatever the format the last step is to give each one a header to tell Jekyll how to process the page including the go-live date, which is used in the final URL – the markdown for this page begins (and ends) with this:

---
layout: post
title:  "Moving My blog to github"
date:   2020-04-18
categories: Misc
tags: 
    - Blogging
    - GitHub
    - Jekyll
    - Visual Studio Code
---

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