About

This is my personal blog/about site where I post random things about cool tech I am playing with. The project was inspired by a video that @timothystewart6 did on youtube. It is built with the Ruby static site generator Jekyll. Hosting is provided by GitHub pages.

Some of the main drivers that lead me to move away from WordPress are:

• I feel writing in markdown is both more convenient and better for technical topics
• Markdown is more portable when I inevitably decide to move my blog again
• I never have to leave my text editor to add new posts or update other parts of the site
• While hosting fees for my WordPress instants were very low, it is nice to host on a free service and eliminate the cost

The heavy lifting for the CI/CD GitHub actions, and Jekyll theme were provided by @cotes2020. More information about the theme below:

Chirpy Starter

When installing the Chirpy theme through RubyGems.org, Jekyll can only read files in the folders _includes, _layout, _sass and assets, as well as a small part of options of the _config.yml file from the theme's gem. If you have ever installed this theme gem, you can use the command bundle info --path jekyll-theme-chirpy to locate these files.

The Jekyll organization claims that this is to leave the ball in the user’s court, but this also results in users not being able to enjoy the out-of-the-box experience when using feature-rich themes.

To fully use all the features of Chirpy, you need to copy the other critical files from the theme's gem to your Jekyll site. The following is a list of targets:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _data
├── _plugins
├── _tabs
└── index.html

In order to save your time, and to prevent you from missing some files when copying, we extract those files/configurations of the latest version of the Chirpy theme and the CD workflow to here, so that you can start writing in minutes.

Prerequisites

Follow the instructions in the Jekyll Docs to complete the installation of Ruby, RubyGems, Jekyll and Bundler.

Installation

Use this template to generate a brand new repository and name it <GH_USERNAME>.github.io, where GH_USERNAME represents your GitHub username.

Then clone it to your local machine and run:

$ bundle

Usage

Please see the theme's docs.

License

This work is published under MIT License.