Migrate to Jekyll in 1,000 Minutes

Migrate to Jekyll

When I created my first version of my website, I agonized over picking a theme. I ultimately chose one that looked slick but left me feeling like I had just blindly copied and pasted 4,800 lines of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. I never felt the site was truly my own, and it lay dormant.

Fast forward to early 2021. I’d been learning Ruby on Rails over the past year and so had been mulling the idea of migrating to Jekyll since it’s written in Ruby and is the most popular way to build a blog and host it for free on GitHub Pages. I stumbled across the Poole theme for Jekyll while going down a rabbit hole about the history of Bootstrap¹. Poole aims “to provide a clear and concise foundational setup for any Jekyll site.” When I discovered that Vicki Boykis’ tech blog, which had just recently been recommended to me by a friend, is also built on Poole, I was sold.

In 1,000 Minutes

The first search result for “create blog jekyll poole” is Set up a Jekyll Blog in 5 minutes with Poole. I don’t mean to single out this particular post, since it is representative of lots of programming advice and I appreciate the way it encourages newbies to not be intimidated and just dive in. But I knew it would take me a lot longer.

First, I knew that I would get tripped up by lots of small problems that I didn’t anticipate. This is the glass half empty version of programming, captured hilariously by this Dinosaur Comics strip.

But the glass half full version is that lots of small problems means lots of small wins! Here’s a list of some of my small wins from this migration:

• Updating Homebrew to use full clones rather than shallow clones.
• Getting brew cleanup to run successfully by changing permissions in /usr/local.
• Silencing ZSH errors by reversing the permissions change for usr/local/share/zsh.
• Debugging why rbenv install was failing. (Because my problem seems to have been caused by a recent change in macOS Big Sur, I couldn’t just fall back on the wisdom of the ancients. But this meant that I actually got to contribute to the wisdom.)

Second, I knew there’s only so much that can be accomplished in such a short time. Even if I hadn’t run into any problems following a quickstart guide, a quickstart is just that—a start. I wanted to spelunk through the code to try to understand what each piece was doing.

Switching to Jekyll made this much easier. In addition to great documentation, Jekyll’s use of templating allows it to be very concise. Compared to my previous site built with a Pelican theme, my Jekyll site with the Poole theme has 3x fewer lines of HTML, 5x fewer lines of CSS, and no JavaScript.

Now that I have site that does truly feel like my own, the next step is just to write.