Chirpy Theme on this blog

Going for Chirpy

Before Jekyll + Chirpy, I evaluated hugo and Wordpress. I almost went with Wordpress, but engineers are attracted to complexity as moth to the light. At the beginning I was a bit doubtful about Chirpy because the Getting Started page is not mentioning that one could also install it using gem. It took me longer than I care to admit, but of course you can use gem, and it’s clearly written in the README.

I won’t add anything that is not already well documented about jekyll.

Change Date Format

I later realized that this trick is messing with the download of some js libraries. I have yet to find the right way of doing it. In the while I will revert it and accept the ugly American date format.

I prefer reading the day before the month (sorry US people!). The Chirpy theme does not have a en_GB. I cannot contribute it, I am not British and I feel it would not be appropriate to provide that contribution from a non-native. So I have instead added the en_michele.

It’s basically just the following:

mkdir -p _data/locales
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy/master/_data/locales/en.yml -O _data/locales/en_michele.yml
sed -i .bak 's/strftime: "%b %e, %Y"/strftime: "%d %b %Y"/' _data/locales/en_michele.yml
rm _data/locales/en_michele.yml.bak

sed -i .bak 's/lang: en$/lang: en_michele/' _config.yml
rm _config.yml.bak

The bak in -i bak is because I am on Mac and the sed is a bit sadder than on Linux.

Clean up and restart your jekyll to check

jekyll clean
jekyll serve

Commit your changes.

git add _data/locales/en_michele.yml _config.yml
git commit -m 'fix: date format'

Adding LinkedIn contact

Head to the _data/contact.yml and add something like:

- type: linkedin
  icon: 'fab fa-linkedin'                      # icons powered by <https://fontawesome.com/>
  url:  'https://www.linkedin.com/in/soccio'   # Fill with your Linkedin homepage

In a similar way you can add something for the share under each article.

Automating GitHub Actions

Mac vs Linux

If you are running on Mac like me you need to make sure your bundle can also run on Linux:

bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux

From this question on StackOverflow.

Publishing on your domain with SFTP

I don’t want to dedicate my whole domain just to the blog. I’m hosting a few other minor things, and I just want to ftp stuff from time to time.

Instead I upload the generated content via sftp. (My hosting plan does not include ssh.)

I found the best solution being using wlixcc/SFTP-Deploy-Action: simple enough that it’s almost convenient than me writing the sftp command. In these cases I always prefer to outsource, despite what Robert Lefkowitz may think of it.

Automatic publishing of content from other repositories

I have a private repository with some content. GitHub Actions is not available on private repositories. But nothing prevents you from using the actions of a public repo to automate stuff on a private one.

I want to copy from my private content repo to the folder content in socc.io.

I need to use private keys to do that, because it’s a private repo.

First thing, create new keys with:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'mc@socc.io' -f id_ed25519

This generates two files:

id_ed25519
id_ed25519.pub

1. Open the Settings of your private repository and add the public key in the Deploy Keys section.

2. In the repository running the action, add a new secret called PRIVATE_KEY_CONTENT_REPO which will contains the private key.

This setup is very similar to the setup you have when you want to ssh into a machine: you add the public key in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys of the destination account and your private key is safely stored in the ~/.ssh folder of the source account.

References

• https://parkerrobert.medium.com/clone-private-repository-for-github-actions-of-another-repository-ada04dc0e195
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57612428/cloning-private-github-repository-within-organisation-in-actions

Copyright License

I’m OK for the CC BY 4.0 that is used by default on Chirpy. However it seems the only way to change it is to update the locale file, as I explained above for the date format. Confirmed on Issue 972.

Markdown in titles

I tried to add a _layouts/post.html copying it from Chirpy and using what suggested here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40470161/markdownify-post-title-in-jekyll.

<h1 data-toc-skip>Chirpy Theme on this blog
</h1>

It works, but the result is not good: the code part is written much smaller than the rest of the title. There is some work to be done in the css, which for now I won’t do it. It could be a nice addition though.

The Time Ago date format

There are some website using an old version of Chirpy where you can see a very elegant IMHO x days ago.

The example is taken by the blog of Sandor Dargo. If you are interested in C++, pay it a visit.

Unfortunately this functionality is gone, confirmed by Chirpy’s author. There are ways to bring it back, especially if you didn’t use the gem way to install it. Just have a look at commit 6d35f5f.