Tumbling out!

In a long overdue action, I have moved the glimmer blog out of Tumblr. I had been wanting to use (Multi-)Markdown more in blogging to continue my focusing on the format. I also had a student tell me he could not access the Tumblr website at work due to its other content. Tumblr was/is an easy to use site but my purposes and those of other users don’t seem to match. I had been looking at Jekyll for a while and considering what to try when I discovered that GitHub supported web hosting with some support for Jekyll. Finding the Jekyll importer that would do most of the heavy lifting for moving the site, I took the plunge.

Over about 4 hours, I was able to do fixups of the files that the importer brought over. I also changed Jekyll to use Kramdown instead of Maruku based on this hint originally from Brett Terpstra.

After a bit more exploring, I discovered Octopress which wraps Jekyll with additional conveniences (even though it uses an older version of Jekyll). I was able to copy the raw Jekyll work into the Octopress copy.

After trying things out, I also made the decision to host against my Github Account rather than a project (although both Jekyll and Octopress can handle either approach.) This was a bit hard to retreat to. I had to

1. Re-run scripts
2. Edit .git/config
3. Edit Rakefile
4. Edit _config

but I think I got it.

Most “irritating thing” is to put bundle exec in front of all rake commands as Octopress is not using more current code. I have not generally had to worry about that in the past but I know many others have.