After 6 years using octopress, I’ve finally admitted it is dead. I decided to switch to plain jekyll which I should have done a long time ago. My only requirement was to change the URL format on the off chance anyone has ever linked to my blog. I also wanted an extremely simple theme that didn’t have tons of css I didn’t understand or need. I picked one called Beautiful Jekyll
Beautiful Jekyll is a ready-to-use template to help you create an awesome website quickly. Perfect for personal sites, blogs, or simple project websites. Check out a demo of what you’ll get after just two minutes. You can also look at his personal website to see it in use.
The process was very simple.
- Fork and clone
Beautiful Jekyll - Delete everything in
_posts - Delete everything except the
_postsand the images from my old octopress site. Commit that to git. - Copy the
Beautiful Jekyllsite over to mine, ignoring all the git related stuff. Commit that to git. - Update
_config.ymlwith the values for my blog- The most important change was to
permalinkto keep the octopress url format. It should be set to/blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/
- The most important change was to
- I installed
html-prooferto look for broken external links and images.gem 'html-proofer'in your Gemfile. Thenbundle installand generate the sitebundle exec jekyll buildand runbundle exec htmlproofer ./_site. It found a lot of broken links some html issues as well.
bundle exec jekyll serveand make sure it looks reasonable
To deploy I decided to set up Amazon Amplify which was also super easy. I pointed it to my public github repo and it recognized it as a jekyll site and configured Amplify to generate and deploy after every commit. Then I had Amplify take over the domain name from the s3 bucket that was configured before and everything was done.