I was pretty frustrated with how slowly this site was running, so I recently followed the herd and moved over to Jekyll.
The transition was pretty smooth, but there were two issues I encountered.
Redirecting the Index
I wanted the homepage for chrismeserole.com to forward to my /about/ page. In wordpress, this is pretty trivial – I think it was just a check box in the settings tab.
But for Jekyll it’s not so simple. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but for now the best I could manage was to overwrite the index.html file in the root directory with this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/about" />
</head>
</html>
Setting up category blogs
The other challenge was setting up what are, in effect, separate blogs: one for my thoughts on life, politics, culture, reviews, etc, and another for everything related to coding. Since I wanted the layout/design to remain consistent though, I also wanted to do this with a single jekyll install.
The best way to do that was to setup separate sub-directories in the root, one for /life and another for /coding. Each of those folders then has its own _posts sub-directory, as well as its own index.html and feed.xml.
To make sure the urls work, I then added the following line to _config.yml:
permalinks: /:categories/:title
The other thing to note is that this means that any posts in the root _posts sub-directory effectively serve as pages, provided there’s no category listed in the yml front matter.
Going Forward
There’s still a little more I’d like to do, such as setting up separate sidebars and archives for each category, etc.
I’ll update this post as I get to them.