I decided I wanted to update the styling, etc. of this blog just as a way to continue learning about another tool (in this case Jekyll), and because I was bored. However, it seems like every time I go down this path I end up running into some kind of Ruby gems craziness that sends me down a Stackoverflow rabbit hole.
This attempt would not disappoint.
Pre-emptive tactics
I thought before I started running Jekyll commands again I would see if simply updating the GitHub repo’s style.css file might do the trick. After all, this is a GitHub pages site that I’ve whipped up, so maybe it works like that, right? Wrong. Changing this file had absolutely no effect, but it was worth a try.
Bundler of joy
I knew I wanted to get a local version running so that when changes were made I could see them reflected locally, and then I could just push them to the repo as usual. So, I tried bundle exec jekyll serve and promptly received a cryptic error about an ssl library not loaded and to use bundle install to install the missing stuff. Using bundle install gave me the nice error of jekyll: command not found. Wut?
To Stackoverflow we go
Admittedly, looking back I don’t know the order of events now, but it was some combination of the discussions here and here that ultimately led me to trying to manage my ruby versions with rvm. Note that this didn’t entirely work as the part where the walk through explains the Rails install errored out for me once more (it directs you to read the install logs, which are not helpful).
I suspect that more than likely it was the suggestion here of switching the openssl version that may have gotten me moving forward again, but honestly (frustratingly) I’m not sure.
Back at the command line, bundle install was now successful, but bundle exec jekyll serve was not. I then followed the discussion and here and tried gem install -n /usr/local/bin jekyll. This successfully fetched and installed a series of gems for me, and bundle exec jekyll serve is now once again working.
It now just…works
I’m capturing this here as a way to remind me of what this round of working with Ruby / Jekyll was like as it seems that every time I revisit this approach I go through some variation of this experience. When it works, it seems great. When it doesn’t, it’s very frustrating.
Sidenote: I’m still not completely happy with the design…
