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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. ...

Note: I’ve updated my site to use a newer template, losing the changes I describe in this post in the process. If you want to understand how IndieWeb works, I suggest you read the links at the end of this post. In this post I try to explain how I am IndieWebifying my website. I’ve been on a vacation for a while and apparently when I get off work, I turn into a web developer. I updated all my servers, tinkered with new software and updated how my website is built. ...

Update: I’ve changed my setup. See below how & why. It feels like I’ve been changing how my website works for as long as it’s been alive. It started as a WordPress site, then ran Octopress for a while, but three years ago I changed it over to Jekyll, running the Skinny Bones theme. I’m pretty happy with that choice. Unlike a traditional CMS, Jekyll builds my site offline. There is no back-end and the site is just pure HTML from the user’s perspective. Because there is no back-end, Jekyll isn’t susceptible to viruses or hackers, like a traditional CMS. I don’t need to constantly update the site just to keep it safe and working. ...

I recently changed the site over to Jekyll. The previous version was written by me in HTML5 on top of HTML5 Boilerplate and the blog was handled by Octopress. I liked Octopress, with the simple-enough static site generation, and the ability to write stuff mostly in markdown. Octopress is built on top of Jekyll, so I looked a bit more on how Jekyll works and found a theme I liked, Skinny Bones. I made some changes, to better suit my use, but mostly the theme was great. The great thing about Jekyll is that I could make the games page automatic, making adding more games very easy in the future. Of course, figuring out how to do that took some time. ...

Thinking I could move all my blogging to a single place I tried using Octopress. It seems nice and light, converting markdown text to static html-pages. In practice, it wasn’t that easy. It might be the ~ in my site address or a broken conversion between Wordpress and Octopress. There is a warning on Octopress pages that it is a blogging platform for hackers. They weren’t kidding. I managed to import my old blog posts from two Wordpress blogs without losing much info on the way and without anything breaking, so I guess it can be considered a success. I almost gave up midway, but after visiting #octopress on Freenode I got some advice and everything in working condition. ...