Dec 17 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.
Aug 22 We have been trying to keep 1 bottle feeding for the baby each day, but lately it’s been disastrous. Both of these statements feel about right, but they’re different so I don’t understand how they can both be true:
The baby is sucking the life out of me
The baby is killing me by beating me down emotionally
Aug 16 So we took our first trip with The Bear, and we didn’t get out of the house any of the days until after 12 noon.
Jul 25 I live in California. It’s a state with plenty of fantastic attributes, but it has its drawbacks. There are the earthquakes. It’s really crowded. Housing is unpleasantly expensive. And we get droughts. In fact we’ve going through one for the past few years. At this point, there are starting to be more fines and publicity about what we should do to help.
My neighbor is not really having any part of it. He waters his lawn at least 8 times each week (from what I can tell). I know because I’m up early in the morning feeding the baby so I hear both his first and his second watering (which he does at least 4 times each week). He’s also out there watering with a hose in the twilight hours sometimes, just to get those spots that the sprinklers might have missed. As you’d imagine, his lawn is lush and green. It’s nice, it really is. He mows it on average twice a week. He loves his lawn!
We both redid our lawns at the same time a couple of years ago. We originally got the same grass, but after a year or so, he got too fed up with it because it would get brown spots. He didn’t like that. So he killed it and redid it again with different grass. Like I said, he loves his lawn.
Now usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. Except for that whole drought that we’re going through. So while everyone else might be trying to save water, my neighbor has a nice green lawn. To me, it seems pretty wasteful, and I wonder how much water he uses (I’m guessing a lot). Overall it doesn’t make sense for him to do it. It’s more expensive for him, it’s bad for Californians, and it’s not even par for the rest of the neighborhood (nowadays anyway).
So why does he do it? It’s his American dream. It’s where he places his hope, and it’s much more important to him than any of this other stuff. I feel bad for him because it seems like such an ephemeral hope. I really think that there could be more. I sure hope there is anyway!
Jul 11 We’re getting out of the house more now that the little girl has gotten her vaccinations, and it almost feels like we’re normal people again!
