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How to Setup a Blog

Install requirements / TLDR

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mkdocs
pip install mkdocs-material mkdocs-blogging-plugin

A Journey

So the first thing you might do is run

mkdocs serve

I was first greeted by this error:

oli@pop-os:~/Documents/blog$ mkdocs serve
Command 'mkdocs' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install mkdocs

Nice it even has the command to install it. So I ran that and got this error:

oli@pop-os:~/Documents/blog$ mkdocs serve
INFO    -  Building documentation... 
ERROR   -  Config value: 'theme'. Error: Unrecognised theme name: 'material'. The available installed themes are: mkdocs, readthedocs 
ERROR   -  Config value: 'markdown_extensions'. Error: Failed loading extension "pymdownx.arithmatex". 
ERROR   -  Config value: 'plugins'. Error: The "blogging" plugin is not installed 

Aborted with 3 Configuration Errors!

So the procedure is now to always start with the first error, as sometimes later errors can just be side effects of earlier errors. The thing to fix is:

Themes

  1. Install the material theme

The website gives:

pip install mkdocs-material

Trying mkdocs serve again produces:

ERROR    -  Config value 'plugins': The "blogging" plugin is not installed
Aborted with 1 Configuration Errors!

Are you feeling lucky? Let's try

pip install mkdocs-blogging-plugin

Oh my God it actually ran succesfully this time (mkdocs serve).

Thoughts

To be honest this was way easier than the first time I set this up. I'm not sure what went so horribly wrong the first time, but this was actually pretty easy.