New post: Housekeeping

_posts/2024-03-10-housekeeping.markdown

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+---
+layout:     post
+title:      "Housekeeping"
+---
+
+Completed some overdue site maintenance over the past few weeks:
+
+- **RSS feed styling:**
+  With help from a
+  [template found on GitHub](https://gist.github.com/andrewstiefel/57a0a400aa2deb6c9fe18c6da4e16e0f),
+  I created a stylesheet for the RSS feed so that it looks nice when
+  viewed in the browser. Ctrl+F “RSS” on this page to find the link,
+  or just scroll all the way to the bottom, or maybe
+  [try this link](/feed.xml).
+
+  I am not a big consumer of RSS feeds myself; I prefer to just
+  bookmark blog URLs and read posts in their original context. But RSS
+  is an important bit of
+  [plumbing](https://inessential.com/2013/03/14/why_i_love_rss_and_you_do_too.html)
+  for the indie web, and probably covers accessibility use cases
+  that I haven’t anticipated.
+
+  (Technically, I am serving an Atom feed rather than RSS, but
+  [people use the terms interchangeably](https://indieweb.org/RSS).)
+
+- **Upgraded to Jekyll 4:**
+  Jekyll is a tool for building a static HTML site out of Markdown files.
+  The built-in GitHub functionality for hosting a Jekyll blog is stuck
+  on an old version of Jekyll which has some end-of-life dependencies,
+  and they are
+  [stuck searching for an upgrade path](https://github.com/github/pages-gem/issues/651#issuecomment-581069671)
+  that doesn’t break existing sites.
+
+  I followed this
+  [wonderful guide](https://www.moncefbelyamani.com/making-github-pages-work-with-latest-jekyll/)
+  to switch my publication workflow to a GitHub Action that lets me manually
+  manage my Ruby and Jekyll versions. It’s a great tutorial that also helped
+  clear up several misunderstandings about Ruby, Gems, and `rbenv`.
+
+- **Removed embedded YouTube videos:**
+  I replaced embedded YouTube videos with simple links to improve page load
+  times and user privacy.