Migrating to Minimal Mistakes

I’ve used the Skinny Bones Jekyll template for several years now. Unfortunately, it’s no longer supported by the author, and I started noticing problems creeping up, often because of the changes I’ve made to the template.

Fortunately, the designer of Skinny Bones has released other Jekyll templates, including the one I now moved to. It’s more up-to-date and nicely built, but adopting a new template does mean that I lose some of the customizations I made to my Jekyll setup.

Probably the biggest loss is support for webmentions, which I’m probably not going to reimplement. It was a very fiddly process and I was never happy with the result. I initially meant to use webmentions as a replacement for comments, but it was a poor substitute, at least in the state I managed to get it to. Considering most of the comments were spam, I think I’ll do without comments for now. You can always send me a message on Mastodon, Twitter or email me, if you want to comment on something I wrote (you can find links from the footer).

Another thing I lost was the share button I implemented for Mastodon. When I find the time, I’ll see if the changes I made to the previous template can be ported over to this one.

The new template doesn’t support a habit I had, which was to keep track of edits to posts in a separate metadata field. It’s still there for all the posts, but just not read by the template. Instead, it shows the original post date as the “Updated” metadata, which is often not accurate. I’ll have to figure out whether I can fix that. I just had to change the name of the metadata field to last_modified_at and it started working again. Now all the timestamps on the site should be correct.

One thing I didn’t migrate over was most of the pictures. At some point I adopted the wide-spread practice of using large header images in posts I wrote. Lately, I’ve been starting to think more about web performance and whether forcing people to load large images is necessary. It’s unlikely that anybody comes to this site for the pictures. There are still some images left, mostly when I felt they contributed something to the content of a post.