It is that time again. I quite liked the old layout of the site. However, I had installed jekyll (the backend of this site) on a different computer and couldn’t figure out how to update the thing and it was many versions behind. So, I reinstalled jekyll to my main rig, deleted the old repo and then loaded fresh. (I am a nuke and pave kind of a guy…I admit it.) I now am using my own jekyll host but I have locked the version to github and have the new gemfiles that should allow me to update easily in the future. That is the hope anyway.

For a little bit the site will be transitioning as I migrate the old content back to the new site. This has been a good learning experience, however. I am getting a better understanding of how jekyll is supposed to work. Previously I think I had really mismatched a lot of configs and kind of jerryrigged things to work. I am now working with the default theme and trying to see how it actually works and connects everything together so that I only override when necessary and keep the base theme files updated. We will see how that works. I feel a bit constrained, so I might end up reworking the theme file myself instead of relying on the gem file. We will see.

##Update##

I have finished the migration. Wow, was that fast! It was much easier than I thought it might be once I finally got my head wrapped around collections and how to link the collections. The introduction of the liquid template language into the index pages for each of those collections will speed up my ability to produce content as well, as they will automatically generate the links based on the titles. I was previously linking this content manually.

The more I have done in updating the site the more I realise how much I was doing wrong previously. Sometimes, just because it works doesn’t mean it is right.

MS Visual Studio Code

On a different note, I have done this entire migration using Microsoft’s vscode. While it is made by MS is is a genuine pleasure to use. It is every bit as good as something like Sublime Text or Atom (which is what I have generally used in the past) but it also has all the git integration as well. Now I know that you can integrate both of the other programs to use git, I mean, Atom was created by Github after all. But, vscode just seems to show me the integration in a way that I actually just decided to have a go using it instead of the terminal, which is generally my preferred method. And you know what? It worked really well, and really crazy easily. The fact that I can also assign keyboard shortcuts to these functions means I could simply press something like CTRL+ALT+S (or something I haven’t actually done this yet) and it was stage my changes, then CTRL+ALT+C to commit, then CTRL+ALT+P to push. (I might have to rethink those binds as I already use them for other things, but you get the idead.) This is the first code editor I have been genuinely excited about using in a long time. Weird.