Jekyll on Flo's Thoughts

Jekyll Auto-Build With Git Hooks

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:26:26 +0200

tl;dr: Use the full path to your jekyll executable when running it from a git hook.

As much as I love Jekyll for it’s nerdiness and it’s speed, as much can it be annoying at times when you have to “compile” your website and upload it to your server every time you fix a comma. This situation lends itself to get automated.

First things first: I host my website on Uberspace. I mentioned before that they’re just the best, right¹? Anyway, at Uberspace, they don’t have Jekyll pre-installed so you have to install it yourself. And since you can’t just install it for the entire machine, you have to install it on a per-user basis:

Combining Matt Gemmell's Staging Script and Jekyll-Post-Link

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0200

Last week, Matt Gemmell released a pretty handy staging script for Jekyll.¹ This temporarily removes all your posts from your site and copies a draft into _posts. This way, building your Jekyll site with your new draft post is way faster than your regular builds with all your content.

Unfortunately, this does not work when you’re using the jekyll-post-link in one of your pages. (Yes, I mean pages, not posts.) The build process for your staged website will fail with an error like this:

Two New Jekyll Scripts

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 14:00:00 +0200

Every now and then I try to make the process of writing posts in Jekyll a bit more pleasant. Last time, I shared a script that was supposed to make the post creation process a bit easier. It turned out, though, that I almost never really use this script because of its complexity. There are just too many switches and configuration options. (Of which some don’t even work reliably.)

Though this script did not help me as much as I hoped it would, it led me to two new, extremely simple scripts in my toolchain.¹

Password Protected Pages With Jekyll

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:04:06 +0200

When I moved to Jekyll I didn’t have a way to password protect pages. Actually, I didn’t really need it so it wasn’t a real concern to me and I did not yet look into it. Until today. I was contacted by Osama of TimeSvr who asked me about this and so I thought it might be a good idea to share what we came up with.

Since we only needed to protect pages within a certain context we decided that .htaccess protection would be sufficient enough.

Jekyll: Script To Easily Create New Posts

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 19:39:12 +0200

Jekyll is amazing for me. It gives me full control over all my content in an easy to maintain way while keeping it in a sustainable format.

Though creating a new post is as simple as creating a new Markdown file and setting some variables within the front matter, this usually takes a few moments and most of these steps are the same over and over again.

To make life a little bit easier (and to just have something to fiddle around with, to be fair) I wrote a small script that helps jump-start on new posts. It creates the file, sets the title and date and tags and categories if I wish to and opens that new file in my favorite text editor.

Searching Jekyll

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 23:39:57 +0200

Using a static site generator like Jekyll for your personal blog brings a few new challenges in some areas. Searching, for example is not possible in pure HTML. There are a few different options to find posts on your website, though.

tl;dr Link to heading

jekyll-lunr-js-search is great, just head over to GitHub and get started.

External Search Engine Link to heading

Both Google and DuckDuckGo offer search engines for your own website which are more or less easy to integrate in your own site. Unfortunately, DDG did not seem to index my site {% post_link 2014-07-02-moving-to-jekyll since I installed Jekyll %} and this plugin a few weeks ago.

Re-Routing RSS Feed

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 15:08:30 +0200

Quick follow-up on the Feed Forwarding section from that other post on Jekyll: Turns out, the forwarding in the header of that HTML file did not work as expected. Opening the URL in the browser passed you through to your favorite RSS reader if you have one installed. Feed readers that had already subscribed to the original feed before did not get any updates, though.

So I changed that re-routing to be handled in my .htaccess file.

Moving to Jekyll

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:48:05 +0200

Listening to Brett Terpstra’s podcast Systematic, I found out about the static website generator Jekyll. After hearing and reading about it for a while I startet wanting to try it for my own website.

There are some great tutorials out there that describe the basic setup of a new Jekyll website, like Jekyll From Scratch by Mike Greiling, so I don’t want to talk about that. What I want to talk about, though, are the bits and pieces that these tutorials were missing for my very own situation. There might be some more people with a similar setup. There were three major questions I still had after reading the different tutorials: