Previously I’ve been using a theme for this blog that was a bit too fancy for my tastes, given it being a mere dev blog with very infrequent updates. Devvy/techy stuff just doesn’t seem to work very well with sleeky, fancy themes is what I’ve noticed; a more minimalist look would be more preferable I think.

So after delaying this for months, I’ve finally sat down to update the Jekyll theme. I’ve basically decided to go for the most basic theme possible, which still looks nice. The Minima theme, which is what you get when you run jekyll new, is as barebones as it gets, and fits the bill perfectly.

However, getting Jekyll to run locally was a bit more work. I have no experience with Ruby at all, which is what is needed to run Jekyll. Installing Ruby shouldn’t be hard I thought, but apparently there are a multitude of ways to do it. The few I considered were listed on the official Ruby page: ruby-build, rbenv, RVM, plain apt, but there were many more, which is kind of surprising to me since I come from a Python background. Finally, I didn’t had the time to consider which was the best method, so I just did sudo apt-get install ruby-full. I ran into some more issues related to permissions when installing Bundler and Jekyll stuff (likely because I did not install Ruby using one of the more proper methods), but in the end it worked out fine.

What’s nice about a very minimal theme like this is that it’s also easier for extension and adding your own customisations, which is what I’ll likely be doing in the future.