Overhauling the theme

So after setting up FrontMatter, I thought I was good to go.

Nope. I took a look at some other themes and felt that they were closer to the look and feel I prefer, and so I began to overhaul the site.

Following Maruan’s al-folio theme, I took parts of what I wanted and used it on my blog. However I had a small setback as I’m working on Windows as well as my Jekyll version being different from the one al-folio was using.

Firstly the gem libv8-node was not available on Windows and its dependency mini-racer was also not support on WSL / CYGWIN / MINGW. Upon searching for the error, I found this page which outlined the same issues I faced, and saw a solution to omit mini-racer from my Gemfile and ensure I had NodeJs installed. That helped, and I am able to serve the page locally as I did previously.

Aside from this solution, I also tried using the devcontainer provided by al-folio and that worked as well! But to continue to be able to use FrontMatter in the container environment, I had to add its extension ID into the customization > vscode > extensions into devcontainer.json.

That’s a really cool solution to allow different developers to have the same development experience in a containerized environment.

So spent the majority of my day cleaning up any unnecessary pages, files and other things provided, and then embellishing details where required.

I also edited my previous post to ensure it still make sense, and learnt to add the {% raw %} and {% endraw %} tags to ensure liquid doesn’t process any tags in-between those raw tags. Or using quotation marks like {{ "{{ this " }}}} to escape them.