Setting up Jekyll - navigation with a modern site-map (and R.I.P)

 Posted on March 18, 2018  |  6 minutes  |  1125 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Preface In previous posts in this series I’ve used categories rather than tags. I have now switched these around because naming matters. If you need to do this, a quick sed execution will do the trick: sed -i 's/categories:/tags:/g' *.md Having changed the variable of tags we also need to change the include for displaying tags to replace categories with tags. Autopages The jekyll-paginate-v2 gem has built-in support for generating pages based on the tags and categories in posts. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog 

Setting up HTTPS with Let's Encrypt

 Posted on March 5, 2018  |  6 minutes  |  1181 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Chrome 68, due in July 2018, will mark all non-HTTPS sites as insecure. Instead of buying a certificate it seemed like an apt opportunity to use Let’s Encrypt, a free and automated Certificate Authority. It’s easy enough to get started with Certbot supporting most platforms. Getting started By far the easiest way of getting started is if you have access to the web content directory. Certbot will generate a file in a well known path and handle the handshaking process between Let’s Encrypt and the website to verify the websites identity. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog  security 

Setting up Jekyll - related posts and series

 Posted on March 1, 2018  |  3 minutes  |  567 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

By default, the related_posts feature of Jekyll returns the newest 10 posts rather than related posts. This is to speed up generation of the site by not using it’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) capabilities implemented by classifier-reborn since that takes quite a while to run. To use LSI, you need to add the --lsi flag. Out of the box, it takes an incredibly long time to run. On my tiny blog, it took over an hour to complete the build process with LSI included. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog 

Setting up Jekyll - prettier paging and categories

 Posted on February 28, 2018  |  3 minutes  |  562 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Following up from the previous post on setting up Jekyll, we take out our tools and customize it some more. When reading any of my posts you should realise I’m after utility rather than beauty. That said, we’ll try to pretty things up to an acceptable level as we go along. Prettier paging The next/previous paging is functional, but rather ugly. The jekyll-pagination-v2 gem has exactly what we need with support for pagination trails. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog 

Converting HTML blog posts to Markdown

 Posted on February 25, 2018  |  4 minutes  |  679 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

I am reviving quite a few things - this blog as well as some open source projects. They desperately need some TLC… Since this blog has travelled through various hosting options and technologies I still had quite a few legacy posts formatted in HTML. I’ve taken the plunge to refactor them into much cleaner Markdown syntax. It was easier than expected. With a couple of good libraries to lean on I wrote a quick Node application to do the dirty work. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog  markdown 

Setting up Jekyll - the basics

 Posted on February 22, 2018  |  6 minutes  |  1113 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Introduction Since Octopress has now been deprecated for pure use of Jekyll, this blog has now been switched to use exactly that. See this post as a walkthrough on creating a functional blog via Jekyll (part 1). This is yet another collation of snippets I have found useful, to be used as a reference for my future self - and maybe others. Starting off You can find the installation instructions for Jekyll in the official documentation. [Read More]
jekyll  ruby  blog 

Now blogging on Octopress

 Posted on May 5, 2012  |  3 minutes  |  508 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

A week ago, I wrote : Sigh, I can’t seem to make up my mind about the platform to host my blog on. You can find my new blog over at www.riaanhanekom.com. Will post the details soon over there. This blog will self-destruct in a week or so. My first blog was at Blogger, back when Google just bought it. What pained me then, was the lack of control - I couldn’t customize it to do what I wanted it too. [Read More]
blog  jekyll