Gitting it Done
git it? puns! git!Git for the people
As I started getting into programming and actually looking at people’s source code, I came across github links and I thought to myself, Hey those look pretty neat. Not only is the source code for programs laid bare for all to see, it also looks damn pretty. Like with all new, pretty things I see (ok not all) I wanted to give it a swing once I actually started writing some code.
Signing up was pretty easy but actually trying to figure out how to use git and how to make it work was kinda rough, but thankfully there’s all kinds of people on the internet who have put up all kinds of stuff to help newcomers like me figure git out.
Getting git
Aside from the online tools, which are nice, there’s also the git bash shell which, as it turns out, is quite necessary to manage your repos (projects) and to make the changes you need to your code. I had messed around with bash before having used/played with a few linux distros, so I wasn’t starting from zero, which was very nice. Again, the help docs came in quite handy and in no time I was able to figure it all out. Mostly. But the mostly comes later.
Webbing with git
This is where I ran into the most trouble (but that said, it wasn’t much). Github has this nice feature called pages, where you can easily turn a project into a webpage (like this one). Since I already owned nathanielray.com though I wanted to shift my hosting over from a free hosting company that has been disappointing me lately. So I followed the instructions github provided and it worked great—after dumping my website files into a new repo, pushing it to github, and changing my DNS settings, thunderchao.github.com turned into nathanielray.com.
Making this blog was a bit harder than that however. First of all, I wanted nathanielray.com/code to resolve at code.nathanielray.com. A little bit more fiddling with the DNS settings and waiting a bit and that worked, but I wanted to make full use of github’s features—namely using jekyll and markdown to create a blog-like site. This one.
Bootstrapping
Some internet guy named Jade created Jekyll Bootstrap to help people get started using the platform. Basically, you download a zip, decompress it, and then you have a site ready to go. All you need to do is edit it up and delete the one sample post. It’s been working like a dream (even if it doesn’t look Super Rad yet, but that one’s on me).
It also makes use of Bootstrap, a CSS and JS platform to help make sites look nice. In its function, it works quite a bit like Blueprint CSS, which I had used before at work, so the concept was familiar (12-column grid layout, fluid options, nice-looking things) even if the syntax was a little different. But because it was bundled into the Jekyll Bootstrap, I rolled with it and picked it up (yay skills!). While some of the JS functions still stump me as I’m playing with it on my computer, it looks and feels very fresh, and I like that.
Got it
In all, I probably took me about 2 hours to get the hang of working with gits and the bash shell, a couple more to actually remember the commands you use most frequently, and then one or two more beyond that to figure out the bootstraps and come up with this site. In all, I think that’s a pretty good time investment as now not only do I have a place where I can put my code up and a system to edit and update it, but now I’ve also got a place where I can talk about it all. I’ll chalk it up as a win.
