reviving the blog

It turns out that if you migrate your blog to octopress, but then fail to do anything with it for two years, it is a bit of a pain to get it working again. In the interim:

• Xcode on your mac has probably updated 4 times and wiped out the command line tools (e.g., the command line compiler and build environment). Making this a bit harder is that installing the command line tools changed to something entirely non-obvious in Xcode 5. (Hint: from the command line, run ‘xcode-select –install’). So we spent a bit of time wondering why /usr/include is no longer present.
• Ruby has utterly changed on your mac (what? ruby-1.9.2 isn’t current anymore?) , and you have to struggle to get anything to work as now all of your previously installed gems are gone.
• You don’t work with ruby projects enough, so you struggle to get bundler to install an ancient version of some ruby gem which doesn’t realize that Mac OS X 10.9 is a perfectly valid OS release. Deleting the Gemfile.lock file and trying again is much more successful.
• Octopress itself has changed a lot. After pulling the changes from upstream, dealing with the merge conflicts, and running ‘rake preview’, you are greeting with a now totally broken blog with now zero posts. This is because you have to actually upgrade the source and style.

Now that I’ve beaten my blog software back into shape, I’ll have to actually thing of something to write about…