Well it’s finally that time of the decade again where I touch my blog xD

Since I converted to using jekyll in 2015 I more or less used the same configuration without changing much behind the scenes.

It is now 2020 and I couldn’t simply run jekyll serve on my blog anymore without jekyll telling me that my config is not correct and I should update it.

Updating jekyll

Since jekyll now depends on bundler and dependencies aren’t handled via the _config.yml file anymore I needed to add all needed file to my repository.

I solved that by running jekyll new . --force in the root of my blog folder. (Disclaimer: You may want to switch branches beforehand to test everything in peace^^)

After that I deleted the following new default files

index.markdown
about.markdown

I then renamed the newly created _config.yml file and restored my old _config.yml via git checkout HEAD -- _config.yml

The mayor difference between the old (I can’t remember which version was current in 2015) and the new jekyll version is the usage of a Gemfile

In the olden days gems would be added in jekyll using the gem section in the _config.yml this looked like this:

gems:
  - jekyll-gist
  - jekyll-paginate
  - jekyll-mentions

The newer Version looks like this:

plugins:
  - jekyll-gist
  - jekyll-paginate
  - jekyll-mentions

as you can see the simply replacing gems with plugins is all you need to do here.

Next I needed to modify my Gemfile

My Gemfile at time of writing looks like this:

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "minima", "~> 2.5"

gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll-feed"
  gem "jekyll-gist"
  gem "jekyll-paginate"
  gem "jekyll-mentions"
end

# Windows and JRuby does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem
# and associated library.
platforms :mingw, :x64_mingw, :mswin, :jruby do
  gem "tzinfo", "~> 1.2"
  gem "tzinfo-data"
end

# Performance-booster for watching directories on Windows
gem "wdm", "~> 0.1.1", :platforms => [:mingw, :x64_mingw, :mswin]

I added all my jekyll plugins and told it to use the github-pages gem instead of the plain jekyll gem.

Other Changes

Handling Comments

First off I desperately need to get rid of disqus… I didn’t like how “bloated” it was and I wasn’t a big fan of using it anyway.

I instead wanted to use utterances.

utteranc.es

In 2019 I stumbled over utterances while reading the blog of the wonderful @mczerniawski. I quite liked the minimalist theme and possibility of using github to host my comments since I was already using github pages to host everything else.

The config of utterances is quite simple. You only visit https://utteranc.es/ answer the questions given to you in the form and copy the source code snippet to the bottom of your post layout html file.

Then you all you need to do is add the utterances app to your github repo as described on the page.

You can find my post layout here

Pagination

Somehow my pagination broke. I don’t know why but I “solved” it by copying the pagination example code from the jekyll website.

Final words

All changes can be found here