The trials and tribulations of carrying out a “trivial” task.

I’m not the most social person, but I’ve always thought it would be nice if other folks could get some use out of the programs I write for my own projects - that’s why all of my personal projects are under the GPL.

Since very few people seemed to find their way to my repositories, though, I’ve decided to publish comments and notes about my own projects to a github Pages site to try and attract a little attention to my software.

This first post is about actually getting my site up and running.

I looked things over, and decided I’d go the recommended way, and use Jekyll to make and maintain my stuff. Looked easy, seemed like a good idea.

All the tutorials look trivial - a few commands to install Jekyll, a couple of text files, push to the correct project on github, done.

Turns out, it isn’t quite so trivial.

I use OpenSuse - currently OpenSuse Leap 15.0.

Ruby is automatically installed because OpenSuse uses it internally for some management programs - I figured it ought to be trivial to add Jekyll and get to work.

Wrongo, Batman.

I spent most of yesterday evening following tutorial after tutorial, and searching the web, just trying to get Jekyll to work.

It seems no one who writes tutorials ever considers what will happen if their instructions don’t work.

Got a problem? You’re on your own.

Everybody and his dog says to install Jekyll like this:

gem install bundler

gem install jekyll

So, that’s what I did. Installed just fine. Didn’t work.

After you install it, you are supposed to do:

jekyll new myrepo

Did that. Operating system says “jekyll not found.”

After two hours of monkeying with paths, and rvm, and rbenv, I gave up. It doesn’t work like that on my system.

Backtrack to the OpenSuse site, and do a software search. There’s a whole software repository from OpenSuse just for Ruby stuff.

The Ruby repository has RPM packages of just about everything Ruby, including Jekyll.

Two clicks and a password later, I have a properly installed Jekyll, and can get down to actually making my site.

Well, no, damnit. By the time I got Jekyll sorted out, it was midnight.

Back at it today, and got it working. Mostly. It seems to be rather tricky to add a simple favicon to the site.

Oh, well that’s a battle for another day.