As a hackerspace a blog is another great opportunity to use all that nerd tools that we tend to talk about. For example this blog is hosted using Octopress. And, of course, content is managed using Git and gitli.

Since rohieb has just added another way of writing and previewing blog posts, I want to update our blog’s documentation.

Working Offline

This is the oldest and most bare metal way of writing and previewing a new post. This basically means installing Ruby and Octopress on your machine. Valodim has written some documentation in one of our first blog posts.

Collaboration

If you want online collaboration, you may want to give our Etherpad integration a try.

Ever noticed the hourglass tool in a Stratum 0 pad? If you write your post in a pad and click that icon, bogomir will render a blog containing just your article. I have prepared a demo pad with some source from an old post.

Another nice thing about this workflow is that you don’t need a local Ruby setup. But: The big disadvantage is that you are not able to test the images you have embedded into your post (since there is no way to upload them).

All-yes online preview

Git has the advantage of branches, i.e. related versions of code running parallel. For an overview of working with Git branches, refer to the chapter Git Branching in the Pro Git book.

Usually the master branch is used to build the actual blog at https://stratum0.org/blog/.

This workflow introduces a new branch into the blog Git: The preview branch is used to build a preview at https://sandbox.stratum0.org/blog/.

This is done using GitLab CI. The actual magic is configured in .gitlab-ci.yml. In this case you can use all features of Octopress – including embedded images.

Another advantage of this workflow if the possibility to review new posts. If you think you finished your work you can clean up your Git history and file a merge request. It’s then up to someone else to have a look at your work, maybe correct some last typos and then merge it into master and thus publish your post.