Rebuilding the website

Huzzah! It has returned!

This post will probably have no obvious time discrepancy from the others, but believe it or not, it marks the first post in about a year. It was mostly laziness, combined with a desire not to put too much miscellany on a new machine. I wrote up a series of posts in markdown in Obsidian of all places but never cloned my website repo to actually push them because, well, setting up Jekyll locally on Windows and MacOS was something that I knew could take me a whole afternoon.

Until now.

I’m in a good situation where I’m currently surrounded by Linux users. We’ve got an Ubuntu guy and a KDE developer. We all specialize in Python, but that’s not the main concern. The fact that I’ll be routinely working in Linux means that I might as well reinstall the site and see if I can get it back up and running. It’s good practice and I’ve got folks around me that understand the syntax that’s advanced since Ubuntu… 12.04? It’s been a while, okay?

And oh my gosh, it’s so easy on Linux.

The Linux instructions for Jekyll are remarkably short. Install Ruby without needing some big installer image. Get all the prereqs with it while you’re at it. Four lines of code for best-practice purposes and wrap it all up by installing the Jekyll bundler. Then I just cloned the old repo, deleted my Gemfile.lock (as several of them had depreciated and the bundler would be underpinned to something old), rebuilt it using bundle install and then just ran the old bundle exec jekyll serve. Easy peasy. No pulling my hair out about figuring out the version of Ruby that comes with MacOS. Don’t need Chruby.

"It just works." - Todd Howard