Learning to blog

Here's a test post that hopefully won't crash the site. I tried to install Jekyll on my Windows machine, but it is pretty tricky. I'll fiddle with it later and also try it out on Linux.

If you are trying to create your own page, here's some tips I discovered. Disclaimer: I used Windows to do this, so your experiece could be different. Disclaimer 2: A lot of this may be repeated from Prof. Spjut's posts. * I used the GitHub desktop application. It provides a GUI for a lot of stuff I would normally do with the command line. * I also used Git Shell because you can't run git commands from cmd in Windows. * To add something new, use git add .. You also have to run this even if you are just editing a file. This adds your files to the "staging area". * Next you need to commit. This records a snapshot of all of your files. git requires that you make a comment for every commit. So if you just type git commit, it will open a text editor and ask you to make a comment there. I personally prefer to do inline comments, which you can do with the -m flag, so git commit -m "This comment is made in-line" * Finally, you have to push your changes. You can do this with git push, but I opted to use the sync button on the GitHub desktop application rather than the command line. * You need to make changes to config.yml. You need to add your username to the list of `authorids` and I'd recommend at least adding your email to your post_authors entry. * I repeatedly got an email from GitHub telling me that the page build failed. This was because I had not verified my email address on GitHub. It turns out it isn't enough to just make an account with your email address, you need to go through a quick verification process to ensure you are who you say you are. If you've done that, hopefully your changes will show up! * If you don't see any initial changes, wait a few minutes and refresh the page and your content should show up. * The markdown cheatsheetis really awesome if you are trying to figure out how to add formatting to your post.