How can I synchronize a directory on my Windows system to a remote Linux machine, and then update the remote copy efficiently when files in the directory are changed? Nowadays a common answer is to use Dropbox or the like - install it on both systems and let it do its magic. It works, but what are other options without using a third-party serivce?

One way is to set up a git repository on Linux, a working directory on Windows and then git push changes to the repo. A drawback is that a commit must be done before each synchronization, and every version of each file will be stored in the repository which is not always necessary.

rsync

Another approach is to use the rsync tool originally created for Unix-like OS but a couple of Windows ports exist such as cwRsync (proprietary) and DeltaCopy (presumably open source). Both are cygwin-based, although do not require a complete cygwin installation being bundled with the required dlls.

A quick search for blogging platforms and hostings led me to GitHub Pages offering to host a site directly from a GitHub repo using Jekyll and Markdown. After seeing a few people migrating their blogs from Wordpress to Jekyll and not being too unhappy, I figured I should give it a try. Of course, then I had to write this mandatory look-now-I-am-a-Jekyll-hacker post.

I wish there were a little more structure to this blogging platform. For now what I’ve seen is people cloning another blogs and then patching all around the code using snippets from the web. Having some sort of components and being able to inlcude them as building blocks would be nicer… well, it is not there yet I guess.

Jekyll Bootstrap has some structure, and even though it seemed unfinished and somewhat abandoned, I decided to use it as a starting point and modify to my needs. First thing I did was rake theme:switch name="bootstrap-3".