Updating Jekyll blog theme
29 Jul 2018Time for a change.
A while ago Jekyll released “Gem-based themes”.
Gem-based themes make it easy for theme developers to make updates available to anyone who has the theme gem. When there’s an update, theme developers push the update to RubyGems.
The goal of gem-based themes is to allow you to get all the benefits of a robust, continually updated theme without having all the theme’s files getting in your way and over-complicating what might be your primary focus: creating content.
Sounds nice in theory. But the change hasn’t caught on completely. Many themes still remain in the old format like this Texlog one that caught my eye.
Textlog is a minimalist, lefty-style Jekyll theme designed for documentation based blog.
So instead of just installing a Ruby gem and changing a setting in _config.yml we have to try doing things the old fashioned way.
In the end I just cloned the Texlog repo and then copied over all my _posts and about page and then made some changes to the config and template files etc.
I ran bundle install then bundle exec jekyll serve…
Lo and behold. It worked!
