Migrating To Jekyll

I’m migrating this blog from Octopress to vanilla Jekyll. I had initially enjoyed Octopress because it seemed to get me up and running in a short amount of time. It also included a pretty nice default theme along with some tools to use. However, the project seems to have been on a bit of a hiatus, and I think that it would be better in the long term if I just start to use Jekyll itself. While I lose some of the included tools in the Octopress rake tasks, I can probably re-write some of them myself now that I’m more comfortable with Jekyll.

I did the following items while migrating, which maybe someone will find useful.

Syntax highlighting

Rouge is now the default syntax highlighter with Jekyll 3.0. After converting to the Liquid tags and running jekyll serve, I got the following error:

Liquid Exception: undefined method `t' for nil:NilClass in /Users/blah/blah/YYYY-MM-DD-some-post.markdown/#excerpt

Turns out that I couldn’t have syntax highlighting for the whole post. I didn’t dive too deep into it, but my simple fix was to add a first paragraph to the post so that there would be an excerpt available.

Theme

I used the Lanyon theme. At the time that I did it, I had to manually apply this pull request to get it working with Jekyll 3.0.