Creating this blog, which is built upon the corpses of its predecessors took a lot longer than I originally anticipated. Considering how many times I have rebooted my blog, I should be an expert at this, but no it took me a week of procrastinating just to pick a stack and a theme.

After experimenting with jekyll, pelican, my own static site generator and wordpress, this time I'm going with Jekyll again. It works out of the box (mostly) and has enough themes that I don't need to do much manually.

Pain points with this approach:

• Installing ruby. I ended up building ruby from source and then installing it.
• Theme/plugin/site relationship is not obvious. To install a theme, you need to add its gem file, add its plugins and change the _config.yml variable. After that you need to ensure you're using the correct builtin layouts (which are different for each theme) otherwise you end up with weird output and no clue why.
• Setting up github pages. - It seems there was a default quick and easy way to use github pages with a bunch of jekyll themes. But GitHub decided to deprecated that feature and they still left the docs online without mentioning it is deprecated. I spent a good 30 minutes looking through settings thinking why can't I see these settings until I came across a community post citing the same issue.
• Changes in the theme. - I ended up making so many changes to the theme that I don't even know if it was worth it to use a theme or start from scratch.
• Deployment. - For github saying it supports jekyll, there are an awful lot of restrictions with using plugins and custom themes etc. I have to build from my own system and then upload build files to a branch from where gh pages is deployed. That is just sad.