It’s been a long time coming, but this blog is now officially no longer on blogger.com. I’ve wanted more control and decent syntax-highlighting, so I’ve migrated all the old blogposts into a jekyll-powered blog, and its now hosted on github-pages. I thought I would share a couple of learnings on the blog, and give credit where credit is due!

Github-pages is a great product and lets you host your page for free - you can even attach your own domain, should you want to (more on this later).

I started out googling a little, and found this great article on smashingmagazine. It explains setting everything up - and suggest starting out with Jekyll now which is kind of a boilerplate for this exact purpose. It makes it really easy to get started!

However, I didn’t like the syntax-highligher that comes with it. Turns out if you set markdown:redcarpet in the _config.yml file from jekyll now, you can write your code like on github (using ``` etc). Then I just needed some styling. Again I turned to google and found pygments css on github. It has the styles I needed - I picked ‘monokai’ and just did a quick search-and-replace (replace ‘codehilite’ with ‘hightlight’) to target the right elements and voila, code now looks awesome. To make it just right, I added a darker background-color, some padding, turned off line-wrapping and instead made it scrollable when overflowing on the x-axis.

.highlight { 
	background-color: #222222; 
	padding:10px; 
	white-space:nowrap; 
	overflow-x:auto;
}

Of cause I changed some styles, changed some configuration and stuff, but the most important (and least-obvious) thing left, was making sure that the moved content would keep its google juice. I could have moved my custom domain, but I’ve been wanting to skip that anyway and I wanted the ssl-connection that comes with github-pages - so I decided to keep it on the username.github.io-domain.

Blogger uses a url like domain.tld/year/month/title, which is not quite how jekyll now does url. I added a permalink-variable in the posts header and manually picked a url that comes close to what blogger does (link to examle). - however blogger actually uses the .html-fileextension. I also needed to redirect requests to the old domain. I made a custom .htaccess-file for the old domain and made it so all links poiting to .../file.html redirects with a 301-header to .../file/. It looks like this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.+)\.html$ https://filipbech.github.io/$1/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://filipbech.github.io/$1 [R=301]

Another added bonus of hosting on github pages is that the build-files of your blog is a puclically available repository, so take a look around and see how I set it up.

Also, I wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas - I hope you enjoy your time with the people that are near and dear - I know I will…