This post started out as a simple test page for setting up Jeykll with Poole, but I’ve decided to write down a little bit about the setup. With that said, lets get right into it.
Initial Impressions
The promise of a simple way to easily deploy a ready-to-go blog seemed a little too good to be true. However after examining the way Jekyll works, I’m convinced that this is the best way to deploy a small blog for the open source software enthusiast. Why only for enthusiasts? Because the Jeykll + Poole combination does require a little bit of tweaking to bend it to your will.
Getting things setup
According to the GitHub page for Poole all you have to do to get up and running is to install Jeykll and download Poole. I had already had Jeykll installed from messing around with it earlier and I’m using lighttpd (which is, by the way, a beautiful lightweight webserver) to serve the actual content that Jeykll will create in the _site folder. After that I simply cloned the Poole GitHub repo with a git clone https://github.com/poole/poole and moved the contents into the directory where I wanted to keep the blog. Now, following the instructions, I should be able to do a simple jeykll build and bask in the glory of my new blog!
Not quite
Instead of the regular output as Jekyll does its job, I got this:
coleman@cobalt ~/poole $ jekyll build
Configuration file: /home/coleman/poole/_config.yml
Deprecation: You appear to have pagination turned on, but you haven't included the `jekyll-paginate` gem. Ensure you have `gems: [jekyll-paginate]` in your configuration file.
Source: /home/coleman/poole
Destination: /home/coleman/poole/_site
Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
Generating...
Since v3.0, permalinks for pages in subfolders must be relative to the site source directory, not the parent directory. Check http://jekyllrb.com/docs/upgrading/ for more info.
I was able to get around this by removing all references to pagination or permalinks in _config.yml. Note that if you plan on using pagination you’d have to actually follow the instructions in the deprecation error and make sure you have the jekyll-paginate gem installed.
Conclusion
Jekyll + Poole is definitely the way forward for quick, lightweight blogging. But don’t think that you won’t have to do a little bit of digging in the config files and some careful Googling.