Site ported to github pages

Motivation

This site was originally on commercially-hosted WordPress.

Today I’ve moved it to github pages, in order to enable https for free, and to save having to keep applying Wordpress security updates.

I’m looking forward to updating the site from my iPad, via the excellent Working Copy iOS app.

Testing edits inside WSL

My home machine is a Windows 10 PC, so I first tried testing the new site in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

This seemed promising, aside from Firefox on WSL being very unreliable, until I created a Gemfile and wanted to run bundle install. Try as I might, I could not get Norton Internet Security to allow rub inside WSL to download anything:

me@mypc:~/develop/claremacrae.github.io$ bundle install
Fetching source index from https://rubygems.org/
Retrying fetcher due to error (2/4): Bundler::HTTPError Could not fetch specs from https://rubygems.org/
Retrying fetcher due to error (3/4): Bundler::HTTPError Could not fetch specs from https://rubygems.org/
Retrying fetcher due to error (4/4): Bundler::HTTPError Could not fetch specs from https://rubygems.org/
Could not fetch specs from https://rubygems.org/

Many other people had seen this problem, and eventually I gave up on WSL for this.

Testing edits on Windows

I then switched to installing Ruby on Windows.

This still isn’t perfect - Jekyll variables not being set correctly also cost me a lot of time, until I worked around it.

But the big advantage of this approach is that I no longer have to keep updating to synchronise edits between Windows and WSL, so I have stuck with it.

References

The following pages helped this process:

• Creating and Hosting a Personal Site on GitHub - a very useful tutorial.
• Jekyll on Windows - which helped me install Jekyll on both WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and later Windows 10.
• Testing your site locally - which told me how to build the site locally.