About LSwift Blog

I decided to write something for LSwift as I keep writing new codes. One thing comes to me though, is where I should write to, and it actually caught me for a while.

I used to be a heavy wiki user. I’ve been using wikidot for quite a while, and then I moved to Google sites, but in the recent few years I haven’t really been updating them. The problem with wiki is that when it grows bigger, it takes more efforts to update, like you need to think “where page I should put this topic in” etc. So I moved to blogspot due to the powerful tagging system, chrome extension, and most importantly I wasn’t in China anymore and didn’t need to worry about GFW (that’s why I chose wikidot upon wikia in the first place, and by then Google was not heavily blocked as it is now).

For now, normally I’d write some random blog posts, but for some sort-of-serious tech talk, I don’t think it fits there. On my blog I always talk about something I’m interested in, and I can find the right posts by choosing tags, and I don’t care about how other people read them. However, when it comes to LSwift, I do hope my articles can help some people, and if I put these articles with my random posts it would easily piss people off.

Ideally, things should be put in order into project wiki, but for now I just want to write some thoughts during developing, so I decided to start a new blog and move things into wiki later (when my “lazy cancer” is cured… someday). Should I start a new blogspot site? As chance would have it, I happened to know that static website is quite popular these days (to be exactly, since 2008) and Github offers some decent support for it too, so I decided to give it a shot. Here are the advantages that make it attractive to me:

• Markdown support: I can easily write things in my terminal using Vim
• Git pages: version control, terminal update, free hosting
• Jekyll: I decided to use it since it’s officially supported by Github

There can be some downsides though, for example creating a new post page can be annoying, but hopefully I’ve come up with some script based solution (and they will be put into this repo). Besides this, I’m still not 100% sure it’s a superior solution for blogging, but it seems to be a better one for now. The plan is that this is going to be the only non-tech post. All the things I write here should be related with LSwift.

About Jekyll

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve --watch, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll’s dedicated Help repository.

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