Walk into most workplaces today and you’ll see a familiar sight: rows upon rows of cubicles, each with a phone, some stationary, and a desktop computer. Ever since computers evolved from being fridge-sized, cream-coloured and wood-veneer-lined behomeths operated by secretaries that looked like they’d fallen straight off the set of Mad Men, the humble desktop has been the workhorse of the Suit. They’ve been with us in mostly the same form for the last 40 years; quietly humming away in the background, but rapidly absorbing more and more business functions.

Soon they’ll be gone. And we’ll be better off.

This is a quick post to share a small bash script I wrote to allow one line deployment to Github pages. There are two steps to deployment:

Deploy the blog files to Github Pages (or Heroku, or elsewhere):

rake generate
rake deploy

Commit the source files to Github (this step is optional but recommended):

git add .
git commit -m 'commit description'
git push origin source

The following bash script does all this in one command: (click on the download button to grab a copy)

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#!/bin/bash

rake generate
rake deploy
git add .
git commit -m '$1'
git push origin source

This script takes one argument, the commit message for the source branch in Github. I place it in the root directory of Octopress and run it as follows: (make sure to make it executable with chmod 755)

./deploy.sh "Put the git commit description here"

For a while now, I’ve been searching for the “perfect” blogging platform, ever since @eunmac suggested it would be a great way to organise my thoughts and share my ideas and projects. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time hacking around with different engines; a mix of hosted and managed, dyanmic and static, and easy and complex.

I’ve settled, at least for now, on Octopress (the platform this site is hosted on). It’s a Jekyll-based markdown converter that creates a static site for easy hosting. It also includes rake files to upload straight to Github Pages or Heroku.

Why Octopress? It’s easier to explain by looking at what I’ve tried previously: