Blogging, hello, *again*!

25/09/2016

Written by: Colin Yates

A fresh start

So, er yeah. I haven’t really blogged for a long time - this time it will be different. I promise.

Hmm, I am already sceptical. It is well known that ‘trying harder’ never works, so what is different this time? Well, I have some objectives which are SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Agreed upon
• Realistic
• Time-based

In a democracy of 1 it is pretty easy to meet the ‘Agreed upon’ criteria. So, what is my goal? To publish one ‘meaty’ blog post a week. By ‘meaty’ I mean a reaction to some non-trivial event in real life, probably work related.

What sorts of things will I ramble on about? Primarily technical I think, specifically around the Functional Programming and Enterprise landscape.

I care very passionately about Software Engineering and critical thinking as oppose to doing it because Google. That will almost certainly creep in throughout the blog.

Jekyll, so long

My previous blog was built using the excellent jekyll. The handful of posts can be found on github. I fully intended to use it, but having upgraded to MacOS Sierra, installing jekyll was an exercise in pain.

jekyll itself had moved to using bundler which I don’t object to at all. The thing I do object to though is a gazillion gem installs, failing on the somewhat infamous Nokogiri.

Their GitHub issues list contains a number of helpful pointers when using brew, but unfortunately I am using macports and after 3 hours or so of trying different incantations I gave up.

Cryogen

I had noticed Cryogen before but jekyll was sufficient at the time, now I thought it deserved another look. And I am glad I did. Features?:

• tags
• feeds
• markdown (or that funny AsciiDoc ;-)
• ridiculously trivial disqus integration
• Clojure (which I use full time at work)
• lein

Some not-so-great bits:

• the site is generated (following convention) in resources\public so actually deploying the site requires an extra step or two. The solution can be as simple as having one git repo for the source and one for resources\public which GitHub Pages then serves.
• the web site is generated automatically but you still need to refresh the web browser. I might investigate the most excellent figwheel to see if that can be integrated
• it doesn’t support org-mode. I can hardly hold it to account for that, and given org-mode’s excellent export modes it should be trivial to sort it out.
• the default theme means literal and links aren’t easily distinguished.

An alternative to GitHub Pages is to host your own static server and rsync it across, which is what I am doing.

Actually, because my yak shaver was feeling particularly sharp I decided to use circleci to deploy it which was as trivial as:

deployment:
  push_to_server:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - rsync -avz resources/public/ coliny@colinyates.co.uk:html/

make sure to create a new key pair for your remote server, ssh-copy-id to your remote server and then add the private key to your circleci project

As the ever-growing engineer I notice a few upgrades to my process:

• rather than commit the entire resources\public I could just commit the resources\templates directory and have circleci run lein run before deployment
• having the rsync call in circle.yml feels a bit yucky. Better to have a commited script which circleci calls.

Anyways, it was relatively harmless and the blog is off to a flying start.

The Future!

Watch this space ;-).