It lives!

4 minute read

It’s been a while, I’d almost forgotten that I had a blog. I recently wrote a forum post giving a kind of status update for LOOT, and realised that I had quite a lot to write about for that month or so of progress, let alone the last few years. As such, I’ve decided to resurrect this site and write about some of what I’ve been doing, what I’m interested in these days, and where I see my projects heading.

I say ‘resurrection’, though this site wasn’t offline or broken or anything like that, as I’ve taken advantage of relatively new support for third-party themes in Jekyll and GitHub Pages to completely rebuild it. I was previously using Pixyll as the site’s foundation, and though I think it looked pretty good, using it did involve having all of Pixyll’s code sitting in my own source tree, and updating it involved pulling and merging changes from the upstream Pixyll repository, which made managing the site a bit messy. Instead, Jekyll now allows you to declare something like Pixyll as a theme you depend on, and Jekyll will merge your content on top of the theme’s, so you can keep your content separate from the files of the theme you use.

Unfortunately, Pixyll hasn’t been updated to support being used as a third-party theme like that, so I had a hunt around for an alternative, and settled on Minimal Mistakes because it looked reasonably good by default and was well documented and supported. I’ll probably tweak it more over time, but I didn’t want to spend time faffing around with the site’s looks, I’d rather get straight to the content.

Setting Up

The setup process was pretty smooth, I:

  1. created a new, independent branch in my git repository with git checkout --orphan new-site
  2. ran jekyll new . and committed what it created,
  3. added the Jekyll config that GitHub Pages uses so that testing the site locally would be more accurate,
  4. cherry-picked all my content commits from the old site’s master branch, making a note of anything that couldn’t be preserved because it was too Pixyll-specific,
  5. switched the theme to Minimal Mistakes, from the default Jekyll theme,
  6. reintroduced all the bits that were left out when cherry-picking,
  7. did a bit of refactoring to tidy things up.

One thing I will note is that my _config.yml didn’t have

repository: Ortham/ortham.github.io

in it, and this caused an error whenever I ran bundle exec jekyll serve:

 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
      Remote Theme: Using theme mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
  Liquid Exception: No repo name found. Specify using PAGES_REPO_NWO environment variables, 'repository' in your configuration, or set up an 'origin' git remote pointing to your github.com repository. in /_layouts/default.html
             ERROR: YOUR SITE COULD NOT BE BUILT:
                    ------------------------------------
                    No repo name found. Specify using PAGES_REPO_NWO environment variables, 'repository' in your configuration, or set up an 'origin' git remote pointing to your github.com repository.

I didn’t really understand the error at first, because I do have an origin Git remote set up correctly, and needing repository set wasn’t mentioned in the otherwise pretty good installation guide, though it is mentioned as an aside deeper in the documentation.

At the end of the process, I was left with about 50 commits that preserved the history of my blog’s content and switched to the new theme. The context of that history is lost, but I think it was worth it to eliminate ~ 430 commits of Pixyll repository history that were previously cluttering the repository.

What’s Changed?

Aside from the site’s theme, I’ve dropped a few links:

  • The Bitcoin donation link is gone. I got out after the madness of last year’s hype bubble and its enduring inflation of graphics card prices, not to mention the environmental impact of people building server farms to mine cryptocurrency and burning huge amounts of electricity to generate ‘money’ that’s really hard to spend. I wish I could say I made even a small fortune in the process, but I didn’t end up selling until well after the bubble burst.

    The /bitcoin page is still up because that’s linked to by old versions of LOOT (I took the link out of LOOT a while ago now), but I’ve updated the page to instead discourage people from sending me bitcoin (not that that’s really necessary :laughing:).

    So, if you want to show appreciation for what I do via your wallet, PayPal’s how to do it. If that doesn’t work for you, an email saying something nice is at least as effective, and my address is at the bottom of the page.

  • The link to my Twitter account is gone because I never use it, so anyone who wants to follow me there is going to get pretty bored pretty quickly, and attempting to contact me there is equally pointless.
  • The link to my LinkedIn account is gone for the same reason as my Twitter account, though I theoretically have an incentive to use the platform and keep it up to date, so it might come back if I do get around to updating my profile…

The switch to the new theme also brought with it better support for tables of contents, so the Environment Mod List post is now benefiting from that.

So, with the obligatory “how I built my blog” post out of the way, I’d better get started on my next post!

Updated: