A New Coat of Paint
In my last post I had mentioned that I wanted to update this website’s theme, and admittedly that task had been put on the back-burner for quite a while. I had previously looked at different themes for Jekyll and come across Hydejack and had really liked it. Unfortunately, at the time, migrating to it would have taken a long time and I really didn’t have a lot of time to expend on it.
After some musings about it, I’d finally decided to sit down for nearly a day (well, a day spanning part of one night and an afternoon the next day) and migrate things across.
The first challenge I ran across was related to my old Docker container that I used to build and preview the site. For some reason, the official Jekyll Docker container no longer wanted to function and would crash during build. I attributed it to the fact that I was trying to run it on my Apple Silicon Macbook Pro (M2 Max), and there may have been some sort of MacOS update that broke the container (which is marked x86_64 and thus runs in emulation mode using Rosetta). After spending an hour trying different things in Docker Desktop, I decided to shelve the investigation and instead focus on trying to get some sort of container running with Jekyll so that I could build and preview changes.
Not wanting to spend a ton of time figuring out how to create a container with Ruby and Jekyll, I came across this Gist containing a useable Dockerfile that I could quickly build and run Jekyll. After a few tweaks to use a slightly more-recent version of Ruby and Jekyll (3.2.2 and 4.4.1, respectively), and adding a simple script to update and call jekyll serve, I was finally able to get the Jekyll container running and was able to bring up my site locally.
After that side-quest, I was finally able to start working on migrating the site to a new theme. Initially I was hoping to use some of the git-fu techniques from this StackOverflow post, but I ran into some significant issues where some parts migrated fine but then individual posts were looked at, the old theme would appear for the post. Not great.
Again, I didn’t want to side-quest with trying to figure out what was going on, I decided to shortcut and create an orphan branch, used Hydejack’s starter kit and then just start moving over my posts, assets and other things into the site, making sure the Jekyll build worked with each major step.
Next was updating a few assets (e.g. sidebar background) and configuring various pieces, such as my social media links (or, at least the ones I wanted to publish).
Finally, I tweaked a few things and got it where I felt comfortable as an MVP.
There was just one thing that I had to do that was a bit more involved: maintaining my Mastodon page verification. Mastodon verification uses an rel="me" attribute on links to the Mastodon profiles in order to verify ownership. This allows Mastodon to automatically verify that you own a page since the link listed in your Mastodon profile matches the link to your profile on your page. Its a neat trick to allow decentralized ownership validation without human intervention. The problem here, though, was that the Hydejack template for social media links did not know about how to add the rel="me" attribute for Mastodon links.
I knew I needed to compensate for this, but I’ve never written Ruby or worked with the Liquid template engine before, but thankfully the change I needed was small and did not need too much understanding of the syntax to complete. I created a copy of the social-list-item.html from the Hydejack project and added the following:
// File: "_includes/components/social-list-item.html"
{% if platform == "mastodon" %}
{% assign rel = 'rel="me"' %}
{% else %}
{% assign rel = '' %}
{% endif %}
<li>
<a href="" title="" class="no-mark-external">
<span class=""></span>
<span class="sr-only"></span>
</a>
</li>
With this, I was able to have the template engine add the rel="me" for just the Mastodon link and not for the other links I have listed.
So, I’m pretty happy now with how things have turned out. I am sure there are still other things that I’ve broken, but I hopefully will find those over time.
I would still like to get comments back and working and, as I mentioned in my last post, I would like to have those comments sourced from the Fediverse, but that will be a project for another day.
