Now that the blog is live, a significant portion of my time was spent towards setting it up to match my original Wordpress setup, which included the ability to add comments, and analytics.

Boy, that took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Google Analytics apparently went to version 4 which was not compatible with the previous version that was supported on minima, the default theme that comes with Jekyll that is geared towards writing. There is a bug that is still open with no progress but that is the cost of doing business when you use open source software. If you don’t like something or it doesn’t work the way you want it to, just do it yourself.

I finally got it to work after figuring out how to override some of the files in the theme and also added Disqus for commenting. Looks like they no longer support ad-free commenting, but the good news is that ads only appear to show up when there are comment threads (and since I have no audience, that is not a problem, yet, heh). A significant portion of my problems went away after I realized that both disqus and Google analytics were only injected into the final static page render if an environment variable was set which indicated to Jekyll that it was “production”. Do it and avoid angst!

Git repo management and troubleshooting markup using only the iPhone was mildly infuriating at best, but so far I am able to get things done. I also added excerpts to the main post listing page and added a “read more” link, both which you would expect to have been available by default, but like I was saying earlier, It’s open source, you don’t like it? You fix it.