Blog Breaking Build
screencap showing blog without styling. just plain ol' html. but still accessible! wink wink

Exclusion causes confusion

Yesterday, I created a helper script to simplify my work of opening the file to edit for each day’s post.

And I named the script post just cause :shrug:. I did not want to call it post.sh. So it was just post.

But any file in the source directory is copied over statically by Jekyll to the final build. So downloading my script would be as easy as going to https://kevinnlsamuel.com/bitesyzedtechdiary/post.

Now this is not a problem. My source code is public anyway. But it is unneccesary and does not need to be on my website. Likewise for docker-compose.yml.

Sooo, I excluded them in _config.yml

And it made sense because I was not using any glob characters but nope, the post layout in my theme ended up being excluded somehow, and all the posts were broken. There was no <html> no <head> no <body>. Just <article>. It did look nice to me to be honest.

Anyway, removing that entry to the exclude array fixed my blog. But I still don’t see how that happened. It should not have happened, right?

At first, I thought it was a bug where globbing took place regardless. But after trying to peruse the source code for Jekyll and understanding nothing…

I thought Ruby was supposed to be human readable.

…

WHERE???

I wonder if the idea is similar to .gitignores pattern matching. And any file with the name post got excluded. So that would be a theme file without an extension.

And what if instead I used /post to indicate that only the file named post at the root should be excluded?

Nope. No go. That was not the solution.

Well that’s not today’s problem. But that’s it for today’s post.