craigmcn

You probably didn’t even notice, but my site was offline for a couple of days this week. I’m trying to divest myself of unnecessary technology assets and this website is one of them, sort of. I’ve delegated hosting the site to Github and its Pages service. I like it because the pages are just Markdown and they get versioned in Git/Github. I use Gitkraken as my Git client at home and Github when I’m not at home. Admittedly, it took a while to get the old site pages moved over and cleaned up, but it was a good exercise. I also delegated commenting to Disqus and https to Cloudflare. I don’t have any servers to maintain and no bills to pay.

However, what has stopped me a few times is that the site is static and generated using Jekyll, which likes to complain about the Markdown or the YAML. Starting last week, it wouldn’t stop complaining. I tried removing the new file, I tried copying old files, I even deleted and recreated the Git repository. Nothing worked.

I contacted Github support and they pointed out an error in one of the files. Fixing the one issue led to more issues. They also suggested I install Jekyll locally and build my site locally to uncover more errors. Locally, the error are much more verbose than through Github. I did it, it was easy, I found the errors and fixed them. I feel like a champion!