I went down a 🐇 hole yesterday when I decided I wanted to try a new CSS framework. It started innocently enough, I found Siimple and figured I’d give it a try here. Siimple has SCSS files so I wanted to import them directly rather than used their minified distribution CSS. However, I got an error running Jekyll 2 when importing their SCSS. Though I filed an issue on their repo, I figured maybe it was a problem that would go away if I updated my Jekyll version. I used Chase’s handy gems-cli tool to grab the latest version of Jekyll to put in my Gemfile and, while I was at it, I updated nokogiri, kramdown, coderay, mini_magick, rake, and mechanize, too. I figure if you’re going to upgrade a gem, go big or go home, right?

I was excited to see the Jekyll turns 2.0.0 blog post announcing built-in support for CoffeeScript and SASS. I updated 3till7 and my portfolio to use the latest Jekyll. This in turn meant I did away with my custom plugins for compiling CoffeeScript and LESS, and moved from LESS to SASS. Here on 3till7, I stopped using the Jekyll Asset Pipeline to compile my assets and produce a combined, minified file. Using imports in my .scss files was sufficient for me CSS-wise, and my one CoffeeScript file is small enough that I don’t care it isn’t minified. I actually haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Jekyll 2 supports JavaScript minification like you can do with your SASS.

Over the course of a little less than a week, I migrated this blog from WordPress 3.8 to Jekyll. I used WordPress for years, probably since 2005 or 2006 when I switched away from Movable Type. I finally decided I wanted something more lightweight than WordPress, and in particular I wanted a blog that would load faster. Jekyll gives me both of those. The part that took the longest to migrate was customizing the new layout, based on Dbyll, and formatting the code examples in my posts.