Hello upgraded world!

Today I spent some time tiding up my environment in order to update the site to the latest and greatest Jekyll 3.3.0 which was released beginning of October 2016 with lots of changes. About one month later GitHub announced they followed by upgrading GitHub Pages to this version. The exact gem versions that GitHub Pages is currently using can be found at pages.github.com/versions.

Themes

One of the most interesting and welcome changes has been the adoption of gemed themes, which was already released in 3.2.0 last July

1. Now themes are properly packaged as gems and can be accordingly installed from RubyGems.

With the upgrade I sticked to the Jekyll’s default theme minima, which is more than decent. But there are a lot of themes available, and now that they can packaged and installed in a consistent way, it’s easier than ever to try a new look. planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-themes is a good place to start to find nice and easy-to-install Jekyll themes.

But themes are also very easy to customize and some sites out there do trigger sometimes unexpected inspiration. For example today I came across Michael Lee’s Simple theme while searching about how to integrate Google Analytics into Jekyll (which turns out it’s taken care of by the default minima theme mentioned above). I like it a lot.