Setting up this blog was not easy

Categories:

blog

So, I’ve had the idea of making a blog to talk about my current game engine for a few weeks, and late Monday evening I found the motivation to start.

Therefore I went online and searched for static site generators. I did not want to have to think about security and do not really care about comments. I wanted a very simple blog.

The first link I found on my search engine was Jekyll, and I saw something along the lines of “You can use Jekyll for free with GitHub pages”. “Great! I’ll click a few buttons and TADAA I have a blog” I naively thought.

Before complaining, here’s a big advantage of my current setup: I can write my posts in Markdown, which is super easy to edit. And if someday I want to change the backend and/or create my own blog software, the content should be portable.

Setting up GitHub pages

That one is relatively straight forward, GitHub pages’ documentation is pretty clear.

Installing Jekyll

Same as above, I followed the documentation and everything went right, even if I think such “simple” software should have a very small list of dependencies; but I am no web dev, and I work on game engines - which are far from lightweight! -, who am I to judge?

Changing the theme

Here’s where things went wrong.

As you can see, the current theme is Merlot. I chose it because it is pretty, simple, and does not give a h@ck3rz vibe which I am not a fan of.

According to Add theme to Pages site, you should be able to edit _config.yml and then:

Add a new line to the file for the theme name.

To use a supported theme, type theme: THEME-NAME, replacing THEME-NAME with the name of the theme as shown in the README of the theme’s repository. For a list of supported themes, see “Supported themes” on the GitHub Pages site. For example, to select the Minima theme, type theme: minima. To use any other Jekyll theme hosted on GitHub, type remote_theme: THEME-NAME, replacing THEME-NAME with the name of the theme as shown in the README of the theme’s repository.

So I typed theme: merlot. Which of course does not work even though the theme is supposedly supported out-of-the-box:

jekyll 3.9.3

Error: The merlot theme could not be found.

Then, I tried theme: pages-themes/merlot@v0.2.0, which worked!

But at that point my posts no longer showed up…

Did you know?

GitHub pages suggests to create a first post, then to change your theme, but most of the themes suggested don’t support the ‘post’ layout by default? Great stuff.

Thankfully adding new layouts is easy and I have been able to re-add the missing layouts (home and post) by copy pasting heavily from the default layout of Merlot, and the default layouts of Minima (the default theme when creating a Jekyll site).

TODO

• I don’t like the width of posts, it feels too narrow, I’ll try increasing the default width some day.
• I think having a link to the home page at the top of the page is important. But I don’t like the fact that it is blue on posts (because it is a link), and not on the home page, I’d like an uniform color, and not blue.
• Make categories clickable.