Writing Jekyll blog posts with Vim and Git

I’m going to lie to you in this blog post. As you read this, I think that you’re assuming I sat down to write this (after some inspiration of course!) and then wrote the whole thing in one go. At least, I bet that you thought that I wrote the beginning before the end. Wrong. Here’s the completed paragraph:

As I sit down to write about making mathematica-style manipulate on the web, I come across a problem. That problem is apostrophes. Vim does some markdown syntax highlighting. Right now vim is making the string “Writing Jekyll blog posts with Vim and Git” appear red to me. Now, I want to take a screenshot. I am running ubuntu, with the (i3)[i3wm.org] window manager installed. I google “screenshots ubuntu” (note that the text in quotes is red), and I get an askubuntu post (which just taught me that "+p is the vim paste command), and the askubuntu post tells me that there is a tool called shutter which lets me take screenshots on ubuntu.

Now I know what to do: bash $ sudo apt-get install shutter ... After this operation, 32.3 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

Just to be clear, the original goal of this was to make the vim syntax highlighting be sane about apostrophes in markdown, and not treat them like they’re quotes. To show you this problem, I’m installing a screenshot tool. I originally encountered this problem when trying to write another blog post.

I type $ shutter and looks like it has a gui. Shit. Close that. Google “shutter screenshots command line”. A nice helpul tutorial (so glad i didn’t have to type that whole url, because of the neat handy "+p command). It tells me that i need to execute $ shutter --full to take a screenshot. I do so, but a notification pops up (that I can’t screenshot, sorry) telling me where it saved the screenshot. The notification fades very fast. Time to go hunting around my filesystem to see where the screenshot went.

bash $ ls ~ college dev Downloads Dropbox media res tmp work Workspace 2_001.png In order to get the above image, I’m trying to toy around with xclip. I do $ ls ~ | xclip -i (the ‘-i’ is for in), and it works? Nope! Not sure what’s wrong! I won’t be, I’ve already wasted enough time that I just typed it manually.

Let’s back up a bit.

As I sit down to write about (making mathematica-style manipulate on the web)[www.bro.ken], I come across a problem. That problem is apostrophes. Vim does some markdown syntax highlighting. Right now vim is making the string “Writing Jekyll blog posts with Vim and Git” appear red to me. Now, I want to take a screenshot. I am running ubuntu, with the (i3)[i3wm.org] window manager installed. I google “screenshots ubuntu” (note that the text in quotes is red), and I get an askubuntu post (which just taught me that "+p is the vim paste command), and the askubuntu post tells me that there is a tool called (shutter)[shutter-project.org] which lets me take screenshots on ubuntu.

I just pasted a paragraph from above, which means that I need to know how to copy and paste text in vim. I know how to paste, not how to copy. Google gets me here which might help.
Nope, let’s do this instead. The text is still interpreting anything posessive as a quote, making this crazy red. But, I can embed pitures!

Oh, wait, I’m using Jekyll. I have to look up how to embed pictures. Google then the official jekyll site which says midway down that you can add in an image asset in a post. I have to move the screenshot to assets (good get it out of my home directory!)

bash $ ls ~/dev/jekyll-blog about.md _config.yml css _includes _layouts README.md _site about.md~ _config.yml~ feed.xml index.html _posts _sass

Is assets in includes?

bash ~/dev/jekyll-blog$ ls _includes footer.html header.html head.html

Assets is probably not in includes. Do I have to create it? Yes, back on the official jekyll site it says that I need to make a directory called “something like assets or downloads, into which any images, downloads, or other resources are placed.” Okay.

~/dev/jekyll-blog$ mkdir assets

~/dev/jekyll-blog$ mv ~/Workspace\ 2_001.png assets

~/dev/jekyll-blog$ ls assets

Workspace 2_001.png

~/dev/jekyll-blog$ mv assets/Workspace\ 2_001.png assets/red.png

Yay, it’s here. It should appear below. .

Of course, I go to look and it’s not there. Wtf.

Maybe the directory needs to be named _assets and not assets? That doesn’t fix it.

Let’s start over

As I sit down to write about (making mathematica-style manipulate on the web)[www.bro.ken], I come across a problem. That problem is apostrophes. Vim does some markdown syntax highlighting. Right now vim is making the string “Writing Jekyll blog posts with Vim and Git” appear red to me.

I give up.