I have quite a few new programming projects moving lately, and wanted to find a nice code publishing environment to write general notes and documentation on them.

My github profile had been sorely lacking attention for awhile, so I decided to follow their Right Way(TM) instructions for building a nice developer site.

My first thought was “Oh, no! Not another markup language!” since I’ve built a wiki with Wikitext, put together Sphinx documentation with reStructuredText, and used only a bit of markdown. Comparisons out there show that markdown parsed by Ruby’s kramdown are not so bad for code blogs, so what the hey.

Although I followed the basic instructions – which are indispensible for understanding Jekyll’s layout and basic features – the lack of included CSS is painful unless you use a theme.

So, I ploughed all that under and copied a theme from Elena Gong.

So far so good.

Issues

Because my Mac uses fink as a package manager and is a bit old, bundler is not correctly configured and the latest fink-installed ruby and gem binaries are named ruby2.5 and gem2.5, so rvm doesn’t find them with rvm use 2.5 as recommended. Also, an update to libssl I did during development at some point seems to have clobbered some of my ssl certificates, leading to Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: certificate verify failed errors.

So, every recommended command using bundler failed. However, when I deleted the Gemfile and manually installed jekyll-paginate, jekyll-seo-tag, etc. (see _config.yml), jekyll build and jekyll serve worked.

Sooner or later I should really fix these packaging issues…