Here we are - my new notebook!

I finally gave up on my onsnetwork notebook. I hit a few rough patches recently where the site was down and it was enough to push me over the edge. I needed a simpler way of having an offline version of my notebook available so that I could view the contents quickly and easily even when there are network outages.

So, I moved things over to here: GitHub Pages. Everyone else in the lab has been using these for quite some time.

It took me a bit of time to get everything configured, as I wanted to use a theme, instead of the default “jekyll-now” theme that everyone has has used. This theme (Basically Basic) had all of the features that I felt I needed:

• Built-in search

• Tag organization

• Project (i.e. Categories) organization

• Display post date alongside the post excerpt

Getting things up and running just to begin posting wasn’t terribly difficult. I set things up using the “remote themes guide” found in the Basically Basic documentation.

However, trying to get all my posts moved over from my onsnetwork notebook was a bit more challenging. I exported my notebook (which is Wordpress) to an XML file and used the Exitwp program to convert to Jekyll (the backend software that runs on GitHub Pages to generate the site) markdown files. The conversion hit some snags that I still haven’t resolved:

I’ll have to manually transfer the content of those two posts.

I also needed to convert URLS within posts that linked to other notebook posts to link to other Jekyll posts and not back to my now-obsolete notebook.

I wrote the following script to do that conversion:

• [jekyll_url_converter.sh (GitHub)(https://github.com/kubu4/Scripts/blob/master/bash/jekyll_url_converter.sh)

Although that script looks short and sweet, it took an inordinate amount of time to make it functional (I really got hung up on the regex in the grep command). I had to post to Stack Overflow to get it figured out.