Hey Heather, it's me again.
I finally set up this blog! Yay! I read through Julia’s post How to set up a blog in 5 minutes (which was a total lie by the way, it took wayy more than 5 minutes). I was confident at the start because I read through it and though “oh hey I know some of these things!” and then I had to set up a Ruby environment. I don’t even know what happened. I’ve done it before but it was still super confusing.
This is how it went: What’s a Ruby environment? What is Octopress? Aaaaand now I have 31 tabs open.
I just closed all the tabs and went back to Julia’s post before things got overwhelming. I really like reading her blog because it’s as if she’s actually saying the things to me. I probably hang out with her in my head more than I do in real life haha!
Anyway, so the most useful information I found was going through the Jekyll site
Quickstart, Installation, and
the arch wiki page on Ruby. The blog post had some information
that was out of date, notably running rbenv rehash. It’s now deprecated
because the behaviour is now included in rbenv core.
Another helpful resource was this article that just goes over some basics about what the $PATH is in Linux. There is so much I don’t know still!
Even though I set up this blog, I’m still confused about how some parts work. Getting set up is hard. For some reason I thought it’d be easier. Then I found this tutorial that says:
Unfortunately, setting up a fully functional native development environment can be a challenging and frustrating process.
Reading that is super reassuring. This is a hard thing. And it’s okay that it takes time to understand. Yay for learning hard things! And this begs the question:
What have I learned here?
What is a Ruby Gem? Well, it can be confusing because there is RubyGems, which is a package manager for distributing Ruby programs and libraries. And then there are Gems which are packages that contain the information of the files to install. I’m spewing this out but I think I’m still confused, mostly about how it works. But that’s okay, I’ll probably have to go over this in the future.
What does it mean to set up a Ruby environment? It just means setting up a way to tell your application “Use this version of Ruby”.
What is octopress? It’s a Ruby Gem for writing and deploying Jekyll blogs.
I also learned that some information on blogs may no longer be relevant, so always check the documentation.
Also: look for documentation specific to your OS! I keep forgetting to do this!