Introducing Partly Cloudy
So called because I’ll be writing posts about cloud-native patterns, practices and tools.
I chose to start by maintaining the site with Jekyll, though I almost reconsidered upon discovering that the latest version of Jekyll isn’t fully supported for automatically-built GitHub Pages sites. That led me to write a GitHub Action to build and publish the site, inspired by this post. Feeling confident with that in hand, I pushed the first version and was pleasantly surprised to find the GitHub Pages did automatically build the site. Good thing too cause my custom Action originally pushed the built site to the gh-pages branch, which wouldn’t work for a user’s top-level user site - joshgav.github.io in my case.
I wasn’t happy with the unpolished feel of the default minima theme, so I reviewed some others at jekyllthemes.io. That site offers Jekyll themes for $$ too; I’m not sure of its business model. In any case it helped me find a simple theme named “moving” which I liked. I installed it by editing my config files, testing locally, and pushing the changes to GitHub. But… my site didn’t render and I received an email notification that GitHub Pages only works with this subset of Jekyll themes. Great, an opportunity to tweak and use the Action action!
So to use my chosen theme I went back and tweaked my action to listen for pushes to the source branch and push changes to the master branch, as required for the “top-level” GitHub Page. It seems to be working now.
Oh, if you’re wondering I chose Jekyll cause it’s an “elder statesman” of static site generation by now and has a community of users and plugin developers. That it’s the official SSG for GitHub Pages also lent it favor.