How I create george.entenman.name

Unlike blogs on services such as Wordpress, Tumblr, etc., this blog is static, that is, it is created on one of my home computers (usually my Mac Mini) and then uploaded to a server.

Since the blog is composed of static pages, there are many functions missing. For example, there is no built-in way to make comments (if you see comments, it’s because I’ve added the ability to use disqus.com).

On my computer, I use the Jekyll system to turn files written in markdown into HTML.

The HTML files are then uploaded as Github Page, which exposes it at the location http://ge.github.io.

Since I’d rather have people use my name for the URL, I have arranged for Github to redirect http://ge.github.io to george.entenman.name.

Syncing my Jekyll blog to github.io

In the past I’ve used pure git commands to copy my HTML files to Github.com. For various reasons that I won’t go into here, I stopped being able to do this with git commands.

After thrashing around for awhile, I downloaded GitHub.app. It offered to clone ge/ge.github.io to my local disk. (This directory contains a copy of the HTML website built by Jekyll.) I removed the existing ge.githup.io directory from my Jekyll project and then cloned it. This left me with a local copy of my online blog.

I just ran Jekyll again to update the ge.github.io. After doing that, GitHub.app offered to “Commit and Sync” everything. So easy! No git add, etc. It worked: now my blog is up-to-date.