No longer do I use terminal as I don’t have a server slice and now just grab open source themes to add my content then drag and drop to github from my desktop. There is a great theme on github called “starving artist” and it works on Ruby & Jekyll . My mac desktop already has Ruby installed and I did use terminal to install Jekyll on it. Anyway native browser Safari shows the theme perfectly because its working off my mac system but Opera and Chrome won’t display it. To test it I went and dragged and dropped the example theme site to github but making css folders link locally and see if it would work in Chrome before adding my content. However github prompted me to install Jekyll via command line when I tried to do a test on github and I couldn’t create a page to test it. My question is , how do I make Jekyll work on github serving the web when it already works fine on my mac native browser on my desktop? Do I just have to configure the yml ?
how were you viewing it? what were you viewing exactly? the raw theme source or did you actually use jekyll?
github uses jekyll in the background to build sites from a repo. Where did you see GH asking you to install jekyll?
is there a link you can share to your GH repo?
I was viewing it on my mac desktop offline in Safari browser. I had installed Jekyll on my operating system via terminal.
Just using a text editor with the source code to then view offline in three different browsers- only Safari works but
for the author of the source code their site works fine in all browsers online.
I can’t reproduce the GH install alert because I’m not ready to test it again but it must have known it was Jekyll because
after loading files on the repos it wouldn’t go to settings - pages like it normally would. Instead it asked me to follow directions
to install jekyll so that’s what has me confused. Jekyll is a language right? So wouldnt most online browsers be able to read
it without my intervention if the source code is correct?
did you do jekyll serve when you were doing this? or were you just viewing the source files in a browser some how?
it isn’t clear what you are doing.
Jekyll is a static site generator - it isn’t really a language - it uses the Liquid templating language and is written in Ruby which is a language, but Jekyll itself is just a thing that takes in markdown, html and liquid and spits out a static site.
The source code of a jekyll website would not be very viewable in a browser - it would need to be processed and then what jekyll gives you in the _site folder should be browsable to an extent in a browser, but it really needs a webserver for the site to work correctly. If you are viewing the _site folder without a web server (just opening the html files directly in a browser) you are most likely going to have problems with css and images loading. Links may also be a problem. The webserver is what makes it all work properly.
It sounds like you are just viewing the _site files directly in a browser without serving them from a webserver - and that somehow Safari is showing it to you properly but Chrome is not. That is about what I would expect. Somethings may work others won’t if you are not serving them thru a webserver. Why one works and another doesn’t? who knows, not worth worrying about as you need a webserver.
Ok thanks for the clarification. I still think Safari displays it offline because Ruby is native to mac and I installed Jekyll
on my mac. I was just viewing it through the index.html file.
So to get this theme to work on github you are saying I need to serve it with Jekyll? How do I do this because the only thing I
can see on github is to link the theme in the config.yml file.
Oh and now I have successfully uploaded the site so that I can go to GH settings- pages but all I am getting is a page with my github address from the readme file
and nothing else.
In the config file I have put :
remote_theme: chrisanthropic/starving-artist-jekyll-theme
and what is already there is:
header: images/logo.png
Plugins
gems:
- jekyll-feed
feed:
path: atom.xml
Compress our Css
#sass:
style: :compressed
include: [‘_pages’]
permalink: /blog/:year/:title
collections:
- galleries
can you share a link to your repo?
there are multiple ways to have GH serve a site. If you upload the source of a jekyll website it can build and serve that (you don’t need to do anything about jekyll).
You can also upload the _site folder by itself and since that is/should be a self contained static site that they can serve also.
The fact that ruby is native on a mac isn’t going to magically mean it is rendering a jekyll site. I think you are just viewing the rendered html files from the _site folder in the browser with no web server and that may be something safari is better at that another browser. Could also be that the css is cached in safari but not chrome or something like that.
I don’t use themes and may not be able to offer any specific help on that.
you may want to do a starter tutorial on youtube or something - an hour or 2 of watching someone use jekyll may help you understand what is happening in your situation.
Actually now I am going to use terminal and I’ve installed latest stable version of Ruby with rvm and I have latest gem but I’m on an old MacBook Monterey system … in clamshell mode and so don’t feel like my old Mac will hold up . Never mind I’m now having trouble installing Jekyll - says cannot locate the Gemfile but when I look for version it says 3.2.3 . I cannot bundle install - that’s where I’m at now
Ok my apologies, the first thing I should have done was read about Jekyll and understand what it is and does. Now that I have a basic idea I realise I need to start from scratch and I’m sure then everything will fall into place. I have successfully installed Jekyll and next I will install git and then I will follow the instructions on the them author.
I need help. I am stuck with
"Could not find gem ‘starving-artist-jekyll-theme’ in rubygems repository
https://rubygems.org/ or installed locally."
.rvm/gems/ruby-3.0.0/gems/bundler-2.4.7/lib/bundler/resolver.rb:331:in `each’
I think that is because it literally does not exist as a gem any more - I think that theme is old and no longer maintained? and maybe they removed it from the gem hosting thing.
You could still try cloning the repo and then strip out all the stuff you don’t need and make it into your own site.
https://rubygems.org/search?query=starving-artist-jekyll-theme&yanked=true
Strip it out ? Ok that I don’t know how to do because of Jekyll component. I was planning learning about Jekyll setting up this site. How do you recommend I make it my own without having to go through mega files ? I was sort of doing that when I downloaded the site code and was changing all directories to my own until I realised this was no ordinary site.
Plus with all due respect this guy put in a lot of work and I really like his work ! I tried contacting the author to no avail
cloning it and stripping the content out isn’t that hard I don’t think. All the theme is really is the css and the layouts and the config file. Then you just have to know how it was used.
It is 7 years old, maybe they knew things were breaking and didn’t want to maintain it? who knows.
It sounds like you need to learn jekyll first - there are lots of youtube videos that can get you up to speed in a few hours/days. Once you understand how the layouts work the things you can set in the config file it might not be that hard. If you don’t understand any of that then it would confusing for sure.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Actually I have one other question I hope someone can answer. They say Jekyll is great because it is more secure and less carbon print etc than say CMS with MySQL and php BUT Jekyll is dependent on a current gem theme right ? So in this case with starving artist theme you cannot simply install it nowadays because the Gem no longer exists. That means Jekyll is probably not the best option because if you modify a theme you then have to create a new gem and keep it updated. Whereas true static html/css remains forever and not dependent on any programs to support its delivery. So question is am I right ? You must always have an updated gem theme in order to serve a project site?
true - more or less for gem based themes but not likely under normal circumstances. I’ve never used a gem based theme because I like to see all the files and why rely on an external theme when you can just as easily (sometimes) clone the original theme repo and strip out all the stuff you don’t need. That is the way it originally worked.
Gem based themes were introduced a few years ago, I’m not a fan as all the stuff is hidden but I think it can be good for some people.
Lots of things in the Ruby and JS world (and other languages I’m sure) have dependencies like the gem based theme and this is the first time I can think of that I have seen someone delete the source. Depending on the dependency this could be devastating and there have been a couple horror stories I have read about where an NPM package was removed or edited in such a way that it broke millions of sites.
My guess is the person who made it had a reason to remove it - not sure what it would be and when they put the repo in maintenance mode they should have left a note about it but maybe they weren’t able to for some reason.
I wouldn’t let this stop you from using jekyll - using this logic you can’t really do anything as everything for whatever reason has dependencies like this.
Jekyll is more secure than something like wordpress as there is no database to hack - it is just static files and you can serve it up without even a server really - for example using AWS S3 or something similar. There is basically nothing to hack - no real server (maybe) and no db.
Thanks for the explanation. Yes I have never liked feeling jailed and that is why I have always bothered with the long way around doing things. Really, at the end of the day I just want a portfolio to display my digital art but invariably in order for it to stand the test of time I need to make sure I am not dependent on something I can’t fix myself or that can’t be stored away on my external hard drive. This guy was really clever in the way he worked his css to display things in a simple yet complex way and I was looking forward to nesting url for my YouTube animations to go in his carousel slides. I think he left it up there for people like yourself that have a strong understanding and can easily make it your own. If it is true what you say about Jekyll themes not needing to be attached to a set theme originally then I guess I’ll dive into it with more control. I did see a tutorial on how to create a gem theme. I just recall long arduous hours trying to create sites that displayed across browsers esp IE and feeling like the work would never end. Now the responsive sites I see all pretty much look the same and are not always intuitively laid out. Lots of free themes I tried yesterday and it was so simple to serve them but none that I particularly liked. Thanks again.