App of the Day - JekyllEx

This new blog workflow is brought to you by JekyllEx and as a result, it has to be the App of the Day. Find it here .

JekyllEx is an editor and previewer for GitHub Pages-style blogs or sites like this one.

It’s point of distinction is to bundle Git, Ruby and enough of an environment wrapped up inside of an editor to keep your site going.

It is free and open source, I found it in F-Droid, and while it’s not perfect it’ll do.

When compared with my previous iPhone-based workflow I can now very easily test my blog post (couldn’t do that before!) but I’ve lost a little on the Git side (it’s command line driven, but I’m already comfortable with that).

Besides, it’s open source so I guess it’s on me now to offer to fix that (something impractical on the Apple side).

It’ll be important to understand how to use it… because there were some tweaks needed.

Getting started

Download and install F-Droid and then JekyllEx.

You will add a GitHub access token for the editor on the github.com site and copy it into the editor’s settings along with the clone URL for your blog. From here the Git part itself is straightforward as long as you are used to to the command line and stick to non-interactive commands.

The next step is to set up the local build of your blog, and this is where things can go off the rails (Ruby pun intended) a bit.

Run the bundle install command from the menu… and depending on your blog’s setup it’ll either work or break.

For me it broke. This is because the ruby environment is limited. It cannot build native extensions, or dependencies of extensions. For my use of the chirpy theme, this was the io-event dependency Of the html-proofer test extension.

For this problem you can disable the extension in the Gemfile.

I had a second problem which was there was some automation in the them that relied upon running the git command, however JekyllEx wasn’t providing the PATH properly.

For this problem you need to manually add the path to the git command.

Both fixes can be done conditionally so that you preserve the capability to build things as-is on GitHub Pages itself.

The changes I made are here.

Then you can use the play and stop button to run Jekyll itself to preview your site.

Tips for use

Remember that you have a full terminal, and also a full (at least) ruby environment so you Can automate things as you’d hope, there’s no useful UI.

For example I’m obviously going to be typing:

git add -A
git commit -m "New post"
git push

Very often. I could write a ruby script for this. Just remember you have to stop the preview to run commands

There is limited file management. It helps to do your file renaming in particular (such as for your images) in advance of importing them. (You can only rename or delete from the editor and non-text files don’t open the editor.)

I’m sure I’ll have more tips as we go along.

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