---
title: ' Learning the Challenges of Jekyll'
date: 2017-11-13
categories:
- projects
tags:
- websites
---
So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host
all -- well, most -- of my writing. Jekyll, I've learned, is a different beast
from most applications used for these purposes. I've found several themes that
I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to
use. I'm finding, though, that "easy to use" and "Jekyll" probably don't belong
in the same sentence. Each of the themes I've looked at require slightly
different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear
rather finicky. I'm sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, <!-- more -->
these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven't
really spent much time with the software, it's a challenge.
### Making Links Work
One of the challenges that I've encountered is making links work from the
dynamically created pages.. Say
for
example, I have a a post entitled, "Blogging with Jekyll". When I generate the
site, Jekyll automatically creates a link to that post. BUT, some of the themes
I played with didn't generate the full link. They pointed me to the title, but
had not appended the '.html' to the page. The result? A blank page. It took
some Googling around to find out that adding the '.html' to the end of the
':title' part of the permalink fixed the problem. Simple fix, once I finally
found it, but why was that ever a problem? Why wasn't the '.html' added by the
theme creator? Surely his or her copy of the script didn't work without that
extension, either. Not sure what I mean?
In the _config.yml file I found:
```permalink: /:title
What is needed is
permalink: /:title.html
```
x
Again, simple fix ....
## Navigation Problems.
Similarly, I wanted a theme that included navigation so that anyone reading the
site could move around within it. One of the themes I really like didn't have
navigation. I probably could have added it but, frankly, didn't want to take
the time to figure it out. So, I settled for one that included navigation.
Except that the navigation didn't work correctly. I'm not working from my
webserver root, so a baseurl is needed. The navigation (home, back, and next
buttons) didn't account for a non-root structure. So, after a bit of plugging
about I finally found the template that contains thenavigation links (they're
not
always in the same
place from one theme to another). Search about until I found the right variables
to include. Now, I have:
This works correctly. I had to do this for the home button, as well as the
previous and next buttons. And, I'm sure as I continue to work with the site,
I'll find other things like this.
## Conclusion
As it stands right now, I'll use this theme. As I work more with the scripts,
I'm beginning to understand them a little better. But I'd much rather spend my
time writing than trying to fix the platform that I'm using to host that
writing. Yes, Wordpress or some such would have been easier, but, as I said in
[this post](../blogging-with-jekyll) I
really
do think that a database driven website is overkill for my needs.
