Blog Restoration Project

I’ve had this long-standing issue with backups. It’s deadly boring to set up and maintain, so I don’t do any. Until today!

Today I moved the sources for my Octopress blag to GitHub, which also prompted me to set up a mirror on GitHub Pages. As usual, reading up on the subject and muster enough motivation took me about three months, whereas the actual work took about 4h.

I now have a concoction of mixed remotes, multiple branches and some Ruby magic to administer it all with! Here are some links I used to get where I am:

• http://octopress.org/docs/setup/
• https://help.github.com/articles/creating-project-pages-manually/
• https://help.github.com/articles/user-organization-and-project-pages/
• http://www.tomordonez.com/blog/2012/06/04/creating-a-github-blog-using-octopress/
• http://miguelcamba.com/blog/2013/04/22/tutorial-create-a-blog-with-octopress-and-host-it-in-github-pages/
• http://octopress.org/docs/deploying/github/

With some added apt-get intall ruby ruby-bundler magic in Ubuntu everything started to look normal – now I could even do rake preview before deploying! Only a minor problem I had before getting everything working was this:

/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/execjs-2.2.0/lib/execjs/runtimes.rb:51:in `autodetect’: Could not find a JavaScript runtime. See https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs for a list of available runtimes. (ExecJS::RuntimeUnavailable)

Turns out I had to install nodejs as well, dunno why.

sudo apt install nodejs

Since I wanted a mirrored setup I chose to have Octopress setup default to deploy to GitHub Pages. Then I simply rsync the whole shebang to my own server.

All this means I can now finally begin restoring more content from my old blog thanks to partial backups I’ve found at the Wayback Machine :-)