In the last 8 years I’ve tried migrating this site off of Jekyll onto a static-site-generator written in a language I actually use multiple times. I’ve failed every single time. It turns out, the way I do things on this site with URLs, sitemaps, code samples, and SASS did not really fit into the way other (11ty) generators (Publish) worked. Most-recently I tried getting Publish to do what I wanted, because it’s written in Swift, but I was going to spend more time tweaking the generator than actually posting. So on to plan B!

MacOS has changed quite a bit since I last ran Jekyll, and it’s also two laptops later, so the Ruby environment has changed quite a bit. On top of that, so has Jekyll. I tried this amazing article to get Ruby setup in a sane way, but unfortunately I could not get an old-enough version of Ruby running on Ventura on an M1 for Jekyll version 2.5.3. So on to plan C!

Since I last updated this site Docker has become a thing, and it turns out, Docker is amazing at running old versions of software! Once I figured out how images and Dockerfiles worked, and I tried-out a dozen different pre-built images, I found REI’s Jekyll image, which actually had my exact last version of Jekyll on Dockerhub. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to add the titlecase gem to the image, so I was stuck again. But I did some snooping, and found a Jekyll Dockerfile on REI’s Github page, but it didn’t work because it did not have enough history to show the version of the Dockerfile I needed….

But it was enough to get me started creating a Dockerfile of my own, and I was finally able to make this:

Now, all I needed to do was put the Dockerfile in my Jekyll directory, build the image with docker build -t blog . and then run the following command and my site was building once again:

docker run --volume="$PWD:/data" -it blog jekyll build

So that’s it, EricDeLabar.com is back from the dead, it has dark mode, I updated About, Colophon, and Projects, and I marked a few articles as old. Next-up, a quick article on an annoying little SwiftUI “feature” (“quirk?” “bug?”) with iOS 16 and 17 keyboard toolbars!