Gutting Dependencies Out Of Your Projects & Life

by Mike Levin

Monday, June 20, 2022

Gradually get better at everything. Every little thing gets done. ELTgd. And it felt good. Good God, it feels good to get every little thing done. This is my poetry. The poetry of life in this awkward material world where everything is difficult, the likelihood of your existence is mind bogglingly improbable, and that’s just your starting point. Let’s see… every little thing.

Today’s Juneteenth and that’s a day off from work. Nice! Get some stuff done that you normally wouldn’t. Of course there’s packing for the move, but that will happen sooner or later per desperation. Get stuff done that takes that special inspired energy that only mornings like this can provide.

Jekyll static site generator stuff. What’s most broken?

Dependency on Github Pages templates. Sever that connection. On which site? This one, of course! Sever the connection. Generate the site and be ready to go back in a pinch. What creates the connection? It’s a selection in Github Pages settings that writes into your _config.yml file. There are also sometimes plugins connected to that theme which would also need to be removed.

Okay, I just removed the 2 lines in the config file that set the theme and plugin. I committed and pushed the change. Be ready to go look at the site now. This is going to be an interesting process, and very symbolic. Cut out dependencies.

Okay, watch for errors in your email. Yep. They’re much more informative than they used to be. It reads:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: GitHub <support@github.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 8:14 AM
Subject: [miklevin/MikeLev.in] Page build failure
To: Mike Levin gets you onto Linux, Python, vim & git!

The page build failed for the `main` branch with the following error:

Your SCSS file `assets/css/style.scss` has an error on line 1: File to import
not found or unreadable: jekyll-theme-hacker. Load path:
/hoosegow/.bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/jekyll-theme-primer-0.6.0/_sass. For more
information, see
https://docs.github.com/github/working-with-github-pages/troubleshooting-jekyll-build-errors-for-github-pages-sites#invalid-sass-or-scss.

For information on troubleshooting Jekyll see:

  https://docs.github.com/articles/troubleshooting-jekyll-builds

If you have any questions you can submit a request at
https://support.github.com/contact?tags=dotcom-pages&repo_id=395107155&page_build_id=351029098

That css file it’s referring to currently reads like this:

@import 'jekyll-theme-hacker';

.container {
    max-width: initial;
}
body {
    font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
    line-height: initial;
    font-size: 125%;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    margin: 1%;
}
#main_content h1 {
    font-size: 1.6em;
}
#main_content h2 {
    font-size: 1.4em;
    margin-top: .5em;
}
#main_content h3 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}
#main_content h4 {
    font-size: 1.4em;
}
ul li {
    list-style-image: url(/assets/images/green-arrow.png);
}
img {
    vertical-align: middle;
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}
header {
    width: 100%;
    font-family: monospace;
    white-space: pre;
    font-size: 1.8vw;
    background: black;
    border-bottom: initial;
    padding: initial;
}
nav {
    text-align: center;
    font-size: 1.3em;
    margin-bottom: .5em;
}
footer {
    text-align: center;
    font-size: .75em;
}
.spacer {
    padding-top: .5em;
    padding-bottom: .5em;
}
.post-nav {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: flex-end;
    // justify-content: space-between;
    flex-wrap: wrap;
}
.post-nav-prev {
    margin-right: auto;
    // text-align: left;
    padding-top: .5em;
    padding-bottom: .5em;
}
.post-nav-next {
    text-align: right;
    padding-top: .5em;
    padding-bottom: .5em;
}
.rotate {
    top: 50%;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
    width: 65vh;
    animation: rotation 8s infinite linear;
    object-fit: cover;
}
@keyframes rotation {
    from {
        transform: rotate(0deg);
    }
    to {
        transform: rotate(359deg);
    }
}

I also deleted some empty frontmatter double-lines so as to not mess up rendering here. I don’t know if the indent would neutralize it. Clearly I need to delete the line:

@import 'jekyll-theme-hacker';

Commit and push… wait for email, refresh site. One of the precautions I took was to bring up the site in a second web browser and pull up the Google developer interface so I can inspect the cached CSS even after it’s gone. I can then transpose bits I want to keep from the cached version back over into the css file. I may change it from scss to just plain css.

Bingo! The background turned white.

The text and links, while still in the fonts that I like using, are all a much more traditional color with unvisited links in blue and visited links in purple. Oh, a beautiful connection to the past. Keep it this way for a little bit. No more Github Pages templates, at least on this site.

And without my old content management system pushing stuff from ~/github/helpers/templates out anymore, it won’t revert. Woot! Okay, now we’re gutting. Let’s keep gutting.

Hit @p to publish THIS page and see if it looks correct.