I’m sure that this is not news to many of you, but rbenv is awesome. Because I faced some challenges along the way while setting up this Octopress blog environment and have now gone through the motions on both my Mac laptop and Linux desktop, I am going to take a few minutes to share my findings.

If you have no interest in using Ruby, you can move along.

I have migrated the clunky, dusty old Wordpress blog into Octopress, the spiffy, mostly-Ruby-powered, static blog site generator. While the primary impetus for this migration was the promise of editing all of my blog posts directly in Vim, it’s also pretty cool to have the whole site built on SASS and sitting in a Git repository on my laptop.

If you want to know more about why this is awesome and you should do it, too, read on.

I love git. A lot.

Judging by the growing ubiquity of github.com in nearly every corner of digital life that can be captured in text form, I have concluded that I am not alone in this sentiment. So much do I love git and github.com that I have taken to using it for as much as possible.

My latest thing is dotfiles. You know all of those preference and settings files that start to pile up in your Mac or Linux home directory? The ones that start with a period? For a while I had been keeping the longer, more important ones on github.com, which is really helpful when using a new computer or reinstalling your OS from scratch.

Today, though, I took it to the next level. Want to know more?

I love Vim, I really do. Having used Vim for about 12 years or so, I feel really comfortable with it. Remarkably, I keep learning new things about it, but it’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole. I’ve written a couple of my own plug-ins (most notably my Quicktask task management tool) and I’ve customized the thing to death. It’s easy to get carried away, though, especially as a beginner.

I started fiddling with the neat, lightweight Ruby web application framework “Sinatra” the other day. It seemed like a nice alternative to Rails and since I had also been playing with Slim for PHP, I wanted to see what it was like on the Ruby side of the fence. I got the whole thing set up in Vagrant after no small amount of fiddling with Chef. I wanted to run it under Unicorn with Nginx in front, as is recommended by many for production deploys.