So it begins! Sites are constructed (read edited), fonts selected and layouts finished. Finally making some progress! The motivation to start the blog came from Jukka Aho, who also works in the JuliaFEM project. If you're into some hardcore finite element analyses, go check out he's blog. As my first post, I'll share how did I managed to get the site up.

Installing requirements

When I started to search for an answer: “how to start a blog”, I bumped into this site. The site contains pretty clear instructions on how to start building your own blog, but in short, I needed:

• GitHub account
• Ruby (version > 2.0.0)
• Jekyll

At that point, I already had a GitHub account. If you don’t, go check out this page. For me, the first thing I had to get was Ruby. And as a note, I have Linux Mint 17 as my operating system. In order to minimize my work, I first checked if Ruby was already preinstalled in my system.

>> ruby
The program 'ruby' can be found in the following packages:
 * ruby
 * ruby1.8
Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>

So, no Ruby. From the message it’s clear that the Ruby version available through apt-get is 1.8, and that’s a no go. Off to the internet to search for the solution. After scrolling through the StackOverflow, the most popular solution seemed to be to build either rbenv or rvm. After careful decision making process, I went for the rbenv, purely because I visually preferred the GitHub pages more. Also rbenv had pretty good installation instructions. Off to building rbenv:

>> git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
>> cd ~/.rbenv && src/configure && make -C src
>> echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
>> source ~/.bashrc && which rbenv
~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv

I’m still missing Ruby so I also installed ruby-build package. The package is used to compile different versions of Ruby. Since I needed version > 2.0.0, I decided to take the latest: 2.3.1.

>> git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
>> rbenv install -l |grep 2.3
  1.9.1-p243
  2.2.3
  2.3.0-dev
  2.3.0-preview1
  2.3.0-preview2
  2.3.0
  2.3.1
  rbx-2.2.3
  rbx-2.3.0
>> rbenv install 2.3.1

Next in line: JeKyll. This was quite smooth sailing since the hard part was over.

>> gem install jekyll

Creating repository

First thing to do was to create a new repository in GitHub website. The name was to be “ovainola.github.io”, as it was suggested in here. After that, I wanted my life to be as easy as possible, so I used Jekyll to create a test website for me. I also wanted to test it locally immediately and here “jekyll serve” command proved to be pretty handy.

>> cd ~ && mkdir blog && cd blog
>> jekyll new ovainola.github.io
>> cd ovainola.github.io
>> jekyll serve

Now I had a first template site working. Next stop was to create initial commit. Since I already had created a repository for my site, I just initialized git, added new remote and created the first commit:

>> git init
>> git remote add origin git@github.com:ovainola/ovainola.github.io
>> git add .
>> git commit -m "initial commit"
>> git push origin master

After a few minutes, http://ovainola.github.io/ was up and running! Great success, just like Borat says.

Making it pretty

Now that site was up, the first thing that bothered me were the styles. Even if this is supposed to be a technical blog, I still wanted it to look nice and pretty. Since this is a matter of taste and debate, it took me a while to search for a nice template. I’ve been using Bootstrap in the past, but I’m an engineer, not a designer. I have an eye for technical things, but making something look nice from the scratch is out of my league.

Luckily, I found HTML5 up. Very modern looking templates with Creative Commons Attribution license. There were multiple candidates, but I selected the Spectral theme. After downloading, it was more or less copy/paste work. I guess I should have been a bit more original and at least change the colorsheme… let’s add that to TODO list…

And after making a couple of commits, site turned out to look like this. Even though I said the hard part is over, I guess it’s only just about to start since now I can start to make some real posts. I was planning to make 1 post/month, so don’t forget to check out at least once a month, if something new has been posted ;). Subjects may vary, but as for the second post I was planning to write something from integrating element surfaces or how to wrap some numerical C++ library to python/Julia. So, see you next time!