Now that I have a Jekyll site up and running I need to customize it. I want to see how long I can avoid using plugins because github does not support them. You can always just push the static files, but I want the entire project in github. (maybe there is a workaround, I don’t know yet.)
It looks like a typical Jekyll site right now. The first thing I can do is update the color scheme. Since I use solarized for… pretty much everything. So it seems like a good idea to use it on my website. Although I use solorized dark for my work, I don’t think it would be a good color scheme for a website. The normal solorized should be fine.
It so happens that the solarized website is already using the solorized them. They provide the css on the site/github. But they provide the scss files.
Lets install sass
$ gem install sass
$ mv main.css main.scss
$ mv syntax.css syntax.scss
$ mv css scss
$ mkdir css
I also had to install a dependency:
$ gem install --version '~> 0.9' rb-fsevent
Then to run:
$ sass --watch scss:css
With scss running I was able to add a color.scss copied from solorized’s github. I had to remove the color elements in main.css. I spent some time tweeking the rest to my liking.
There are still a few things that bug me right now.
While trying to think about how to resolve these issues, I found Octopress. It seems perfect until you notice it hasn’t been updated since July 2011.
On Github it looks like a single guy pushes updates a few times a week. But it’s currently failing the build. It also has 35 outstanding pull requests ranging from one year ago to 11 hours ago.
To me this looks like there is a small active community but the maintaior doens’t spend a lot of time on it. (Possibly why the website hasn’t been updated in 2 years.)
So this leaves me with two options. I can continue using native Jekyll and just impliment features I want myself. Or I could fork Octopress and just fix anything I need.