Static html blog

After 2 years of inactivity, I decided to resurrect my blog as a place to store technical snippets. Previously I wrote my blog using Jekyll, but did not get on with Ruby and constant Gem updates, so am giving Wintersmith a try, it’s built on top of node.js, easy to install and under active development.

Last time I ground to a halt because my laptop was stolen before I backed up the code anywhere, so I’ll be pushing the source to GitHub and trying out their user pages for hosting.

Install node.js I chose to download the package and install it, but it’s available on brew as well.
Install wintersmith using npm. The -g option makes it globally available.
```
sudo npm install wintersmith -g
```
As I had decided that I be wanted to store the source of the website and host the output on GitHub, I needed to create a repository to show my user pages and a repository to store the source code of the website.

The user pages are created in the format username.github.io so in my case I created a public repository named davidtron.github.io

I then created another repository for the sourcecode called spiraltechnology-website
Open a terminal and check out the empty repository, in my case into my dev directory.
```
cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/davidtron/spiraltechnology-website
```
Create a new website, by default wintersmith will create you a basic blog structure with a plugin to render blog articles and an rss feed. It complains if the directory exists, but in this case I want to populate the directory of my empty spiraltechnology-website repo, so I used the —force flag.
```
wintersmith new spiraltechnology-website --force
cd spiraltechnology-website
wintersmith preview
```
The first problem I had was
```
template archive.jade: /Users/david/dev/spiraltechnology-website/
templates/layout.jade: > 1| !!! 5
```
Looks like the version in npm is not yet up to date with the version on github. To fix follow it’s advice and replace !!! 5 with doctype html
```
nano -w /Users/david/dev/spiraltechnology-website/templates/layout.jade
```
Once done you can view the site in a browser on localhost:8080
After creating some content and tweaking the layout and css, I added my files, commited them to my local repo then pushed the changes up to github.
```
cd ~/dev/spiraltechnology-website-deploy
git add *
git commit -a -m "First pages commit. WIP"
git push origin master
```
Once happy with the site, you need to configure wintersmith to build the flat files to a local directory and the contents on this directory needs to be published to the username.github.io repository we created earlier.

Checkout the empty repository
```
cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/davidtron/davidtron.github.io.git spiraltechnology-website-deploy
cd spiraltechnology-website-deploy
git checkout master
```

Configure wintersmith to build to the deploy directory. This is controlled by adding an output option to config.json in the root of the directory wintersmith created for us.

{
  "locals": {
    "url": "http://www.spiraltechnology.co.uk",
    "name": "spiraltechnology",
    "owner": "David",
    "description": "simple, pragmatic, elegant code"
  },
  "output" : "../spiraltechnology-website-deploy"
  ...
}

In the source directory compile the website, it should output it into the newly created deployment directory
```
cd ~/dev/spiraltechnology-website
wintersmith build
```

Add the files in the github pages branch and push it up to the server.

cd ~/dev/spiraltechnology-website-deploy
git add *
git commit -a -m "First pages commit."
git push origin master

Check that it’s published after a few minutes at http://davidtron.github.io