Need help troubleshooting older Jekyll install (2017)

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1

Hello Jekyllers, I set up my first Jekyll personal site in 2017, configured hosting on Github page, and it was great. I wrote 4 blog posts, then got a new job and had no time to keep writing. 7 years later, I decided it was time to start writing again, but because I replaced my laptop since then, I no longer had a local development environment to use. Fortunately, I had heard about Github Codespaces, so I decided to open the git repository in Codespaces, and use that to create some new blog posts.

Well, when I went to run the Jekyll server, I got some errors. The Ruby version in Codespaces today by default is too new for my 2017 Jekyll install. So I used the Ruby Version Manager to downgrade to Ruby 3.0, and then I got some errors. I think it had to do with the bundler needed be updated. I’m not sure, but I followed the prompts, and was able to “bundle update” successfully, with no errors. And I was also able to run:
bundle exec jekyll serve --watch

And it seems like it ran just as I remember it. When I save a file it says it is re-building the new post that I saved. See the seemingly successful command line output that results each time I save the edited post:

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --watch
Configuration file: /workspaces/ssmagula.github.io/_config.yml
       Deprecation: The 'gems' configuration option has been renamed to 'plugins'. Please update your config file accordingly.
To use retry middleware with Faraday v2.0+, install `faraday-retry` gem
            Source: /workspaces/ssmagula.github.io
       Destination: /workspaces/ssmagula.github.io/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating... 
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                    done in 1.819 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/workspaces/ssmagula.github.io'
    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
      Regenerating: 1 file(s) changed at 2024-12-03 03:27:39
                    _posts/2024-11-25-Thoughts_on_first_browser
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                    ...done in 1.352588353 seconds.

But when I opened the preview of the site in the browser, I noticed that the blog post did not appear in the blog.html page, which I think should list the most recent blog posts.

Nor is there an automatically generated directory like:
_site/2024/12/02/

I expected to see in the preview the new post that I just saved (which Jekyll says it generated). I also expected to have a _site/2024/12/02 directory generated, just like I see a 2017 directory that was generated.

Note: bear with me, it has been almost a decade since I used Jekyll and git. I just realized I’m working in the master branch. Should I push to master with “git push -u origin master”? Should I switch to a new branch, so I don’t eff this up more?

Thanks for any advice or help.

2

I would definitely change the branch to main and see if that resolves anything.

3

Thanks for writing. I figured it out!

The problem was: the file that I was adding to the “posts” was named “_posts/2024-11-25-my_first_browser” and it should have been named “”_posts/2024-11-25-my_first_browser.markdown"

The lack of the .markdown file type ending was enough to break the generation of the directories, etc., but not enough to trigger an error during generation.

Thanks for helping me keep going, I appreciate it.

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