marcusturnerwood.github.io

marcusturnerwood.github.io

Personal blog, built with Jekyll (minima theme) and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Running locally

No Ruby installation required — this uses the official Jekyll Docker image. Run this from the repo root (not from site/) — _config.yml, _posts/, _layouts/, etc. all live at the root; only the Gemfile sits in site/, so it’s pointed at explicitly via BUNDLE_GEMFILE.

docker run --rm -it -p 4000:4000 -v "$PWD":/srv/jekyll -e BUNDLE_GEMFILE=/srv/jekyll/site/Gemfile jekyll/jekyll:latest sh -c "bundle install && bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0 --livereload --force_polling"

Then open http://localhost:4000. --force_polling is needed for live-reload to pick up file changes on Windows/macOS bind mounts.

Add --drafts to also preview unpublished posts sitting in _drafts/ (that folder is gitignored — nothing in it gets committed until you move a post into _posts/).

Comments & likes (giscus)

Comments and reactions (likes) are powered by giscus, which stores them as GitHub Discussions on this repo — free, no tracking, no ads. Already configured (see giscus: in _config.yml), using the repo’s General Discussion category.

Moderation note: comments appear as soon as they’re posted (GitHub Discussions has no pre-approval queue). To remove one, delete or lock the relevant discussion/comment on GitHub directly — watch the repo to get notified as they come in. Because General is an open-ended category rather than “Announcement”-restricted, anyone with a GitHub account can also start a new top-level Discussion there directly (not just via a giscus comment on a post) — if unrelated threads start showing up, moving to a dedicated, maintainer-only-restricted category is the fix (create it, update giscus.category/category_id in _config.yml, restart).

Email subscription (Buttondown)

The primary “follow this blog” option is an email subscribe form (homepage + footer), via Buttondown — free tier, no backend needed, the form posts straight to Buttondown’s hosted endpoint. Not yet configured: sign up, then set buttondown.username in _config.yml and restart the server (config changes need a restart, not just a rebuild). The form is hidden automatically whenever buttondown.username is empty.

The RSS feed (/feed.xml) still exists and is valid — Buttondown can actually auto-import new posts from it and email them out, so once a username is set there’s no need to change anything about how posts get published.