jekyll

Features of a good Jekyll theme

25 May 2016

I wanted to refocus on my efforts to write personal blog, hence started looking into Jekyll. I once had some initial code/content on my Github which I checked out. Meanwhile, I’ve got a new Mac, so I had to install Jekyll on it. To my surprise, when I ran jekyll serve, Jekyll started complaining.

Issues were:

• Apparently I was using an older version of Jekyll, and I have 3.x.
• Some plugins needed gem installation, which I didn’t have.

Reading the error messages and googling helped. To be specific:

• I had to remove a tag that was configuring things for permanent link.
• The code highlighter is now rouge, not pygment.
• I had to add a gems property to enlist two plugins that I got from Hyde (the template I am using). I also had to install these gems manually.

I am now convinced that a theme should make users’ life easier by providing a Gemfile, thus allowing bundle install to run. More on this here, and here.