My Blogging Workflow

Honestly this took me a while to realize how to actually make it happen. Initially, I just wanted to make things as simple as it can be and as cheap, which led me to using GitHub Pages and Jekyll. Unfortunately identifying the right workflow was harder than I thought.

Version 1 - My first try at a functioning workflow for my blog was through my main Raspberry Pi. I configured my layout, setup GitHub, repointed my domain, and created a script that whatever I wrote down on my Pi (using Vi, of course!) would then automatically be pushed back to the repository and in turn be published to the web.

Raspberry Pi -> Jekyll Build -> Push to Git -> GitHub Pages -> Http://ogbinar.com

This, albeit simple, did had a lot of set backs. First of all, it was a very unwieldy flow. It was very hard to add images, I had to use terminal before I could start, and it didn’t really give me options on blogging via other locations ie. not from home, in transit, etc.

Version 1.5 (proposed) - This never materials but I played around with a few ideas on how to improve upon this setup. The first one I solved was how to add images (which actually happened and is a dirty workaround!) this was done by creating a shared drive on my main PC wherein I could just drop images I would use and then tag them during my blogging workflow. Next problem I thought of was a better interface (besides terminal and Vi) and a more accessibility. Around this time, I was able to already expose my RPi to the internet (Expect a post about it), this gives me options in the sense that I could create a web served app which I could use to update my blog and then just call my push script to build the site and push to Git.

Web App CMS Editor hosted on Raspberry Pi -> Remote Jekyll Build and Push to git script -> GitHub Pages -> Http://ogbinar.com

Version 2.0 (Today) - Planning for the above solution took me a long time to go through that I was able to identify alternative approaches to the problem in the form of dedicated online static CMS editors, in this case Netlify CMS. It’s a nice piece of software created by the Netlify folks to address the lack of open source and free options in the static CMS space of editors. It took me a while to really figure out how to configure it (I’ll see about making a post about this also) but finally here is my new workflow.

online Netlify CMS Editor -> Netlify Jekyll Build -> Push to Git -> Github Pages -> Http://ogbinar.com

This new work flow not only addresses most of my initial challenges, but also adds a new more features needed such as 1) authentication 2) Rich text editor 3) A UI that reflects my simple blog requirements and my favorite 4) it’s free and open source!

myk

Small Progress is Still Progress

I’ve made some updates on where I am with the Raspberry Pi project. Decided I would try some Twitter text mining application. It’s been so long since I last did Twitter mining using it’s api so I had to review a lot of stuff.

Since I also moved my development platform to the Pi, I had to do some changes in how I move images (essentially just mapped a network drive using Samba).

My next step is to do some more testing with Twitter. Right now my top of mind idea is to extract top topics being talked in the Philippines by mining Filipino related Twitter ids. Let’s see if it makes any sense at all.

In other news, I’ve also started playing Apex Legends. It’s a Battle Royale game similar to PUBG which is all the rage these days in the gaming community (even Tetris has one, which is for some reason is REALLY GOOD).

myk

Raspberry Pi

Sometime ago I bought a raspberry pi to try out some ideas. This is actually a really good product for the engineer hobbyist to try out and experiment.

Finally found the time to try again. I’ll probably create a list of the things I want to do. For now, feel free to visit the project site Raspberry Pi Server.

What I just did it slap an apache web server on top of a raspbian installation. I’ll probably post a how-to guide later and maybe a design and my thought process on it. For now I’m just happy that it works.

cheers!

myk

Polishing Mode

I spent around 2 hours today just polishing the layout and setup of this blog. I think there’s still a long way off before I’m more or less satisfied by its features but as of today:

• links are better (sidebar) using [Fontawesome] (fontawesome.com)
• Was able to implement topic tagging ( with the help of this guy )
• I think I’m starting to have a better workflow in development and deployment to GitHub Pages

In other news I also spent sometime playing some PUBG just to relax a bit.

myk

New Theme

Today I was able to setup a new theme. It took me a bit of exploring before I finally got how to use Jekyll.

The theme I got is Hyde which is simple enough for me to use and configure for now.

I’m going to spend the next few days configuring this to my specifications before I do anything more on content creation.

myk