Background

The crash of my computer in the last weekend motivated me to think about using Octopress on Windows 7. It is an irony that the computer had been fixed before I could finally build the site with rake generate and start writing posts for this blog on Windows 7.

Problems

Provided that a blogger have some experience in using computers, the setup should be easy for his/her who wish to start a new Octopress blog on Windows and post simple contents like text, pictures, videos, etc.

However, I would post something more complicated, such as code blocks with syntax highlighting. Having spent time experimenting with code and commands, I don’t want to forget them and it’s better to write them down. I prefer a blog over a paper notebook.

Before writing anything new, I tested if I could locally build the site from the source branch cloned from the remote repository on GitHub on this Sunday, and the first Liquid exception occurred. I remembered rake said something like this.¹

C:\github\vincenttam.github.io>rake generate
## Generating Site with Jekyll
unchanged sass/print.scss
identical source/stylesheets/screen.css 
Configuration from C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/_config.yml
Building site: source -> public
Liquid Exception: Pygments can't parse unknown language: tex. in 2014-03-16-latex-template-for-essays.markdown
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/pygments_code.rb:27:in `rescue in pygments'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/pygments_code.rb:24:in `pygments'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/pygments_code.rb:14:in `highlight'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/code_block.rb:82:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:94:in `block in render_all'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `collect'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `render_all'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:82:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:124:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:132:in `render!'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:79:in `do_layout'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/post_filters.rb:167:in `do_layout'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/lib/jekyll/post.rb:195:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/lib/jekyll/site.rb:200:in `block in render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/lib/jekyll/site.rb:199:in `each'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/lib/jekyll/site.rb:199:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/lib/jekyll/site.rb:41:in `process'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.1/bin/jekyll:264:in `<top (required)>'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/bin/jekyll:23:in `load'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/bin/jekyll:23:in `<main>'
Build Failed

I extracted part of the above message and googled “Liquid Exception: Pygments can’t parse unknown language” for web pages that reported on similar issues. It’s quite abnormal since tex is one of the lexers recognised by Pygments. In the past three months, I had successfully generated the site for numerous times, so it shouldn’t be the problem of the markdown syntax of my posts. Having no idea on what the error was, I had browsed plenty of pages. Then I saw a question on Stack Overflow and realized that I had forgotten to add Python into the PATH. Following Sam Lin’s answer, I got the exact problem as described in the code block in the Stack Overflow question.

C:\github\vincenttam.github.io>rake generate
## Generating Site with Jekyll
unchanged sass/print.scss
identical source/stylesheets/screen.css 
Configuration from C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/_config.yml
Building site: source -> public
Liquid Exception: No such file or directory - python
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pygments.rb-0.3.7/lib/pygments/mentos.py in 2014-03-16-latex-template-for-essays.markdown
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/posix-spawn-0.3.6/lib/posix/spawn.rb:162:in `spawn'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/posix-spawn-0.3.6/lib/posix/spawn.rb:162:in `spawn'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/posix-spawn-0.3.6/lib/posix/spawn.rb:307:in `popen4'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pygments.rb-0.3.7/lib/pygments/popen.rb:41:in `start'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pygments.rb-0.3.7/lib/pygments/popen.rb:203: in `mentos'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pygments.rb-0.3.7/lib/pygments/popen.rb:192: in `highlight'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/pygments_code.rb:24:in `pygments'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/pygments_code.rb:14:in `highlight'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/code_block.rb:82:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:94:in `block in render_all'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `collect'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `render_all'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:82:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:124:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:132:in `render!'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:79:in `do_layout'
C:/github/vincenttam.github.io/plugins/post_filters.rb:167:in `do_layout'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/post.rb:195:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:200:in `block in render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:199:in `each'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:199:in `render'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:41:in `process'
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/bin/jekyll:264:in `<top (required)>'
C:/Ruby193/bin/jekyll:23:in `load'
C:/Ruby193/bin/jekyll:23:in `<main>'
Build Failed

This time, it’s impossible for me to find the solution in the above referenced Stack Overflow question. I tried searching “liquid exception no such file or directory - python” on Google. I could find many pages which suggested me to reinstall the gem(s) or Ruby, but I didn’t want to do so since I had just installed them this afternoon.

I once thought that there’s a missing file named mentos.py in the Ruby gem pygments.rb. However, I quickly knew that I was mistaken.

At that time, I opened lots of tabs in my Firefox. Even though I had already known the steps for blogging with Octopress on Windows 7, I had not yet closed tabs for some related web pages, such as Setup Octopress On Windows7. I went over 在 Windows 使用 Octopress–不歸錄 written by Tony Jan again, and the saw the section 安裝 Python, where I discovered the reason for this error: Python 3.3 is not well-supported by a component on which Octopress depends. I followed the advice in the last sentence in that section and avoided further configurations by changing the Python version from 3.3 to 2.7. After downgrading Python, I believe that I could quickly preview the results. Nonetheless, I was shocked by rake’s output.

Thinking that the gem mini_magick was the cause of this problem, I realised that there would be fewer web pages about this problem. To gather more information, I tried googling “liquid exception: undefined method size”, but they weren’t relevant to my problem. Learning nothing from the web pages I had seen, I decided to include the word “mini_magick” in the search query string, but I still couldn’t find a useful page. I decided to be very specific and searched “gems/mini_magick-3.7.0/lib/mini_magick.rb:24:in”. This time, I managed to find some instructions that I can understand and follow. I was inspired by an Ubuntu command in a simple answer for a question about Liquid exception on Stack Overflow² and finally fixed this glitch by installing ImageMagick on Windows 7 and including it in my PATH variable.

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

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