This morning I tried to switch to pure HTML from Jekyll on GitHub pages and it was not trivial, I finally punted and gave up but I wanted to share the brick wall I ran into so I can try again later.
Simple, I am trying to use my computer less. When I have a thought I would like to share and say I have my phone on me, I would just like to rip out a blog post, without setting up git, getting a decent text editor, etc it's just too much work to do well.
My Jekyll version was apparently out of date and needed a security fix. Dependabot deemed it too hard to fix itself so I had to get the computer out to upgrade it. I realized this is not what I want to be doing. This is too much work for glorified HTML that would never have this problem.
I wrote a simple python script that attempted to convert the markdown to HTML. This also took a few attempts and I saved off the home page with all the links I figured I don't blog enough to warrant dynamic post linking from the home page. However the result was unusable
The code marked down with back tics did not parse correctly and All of the posts with code (most of them) were a disaster. As a result I converted stripped out my theme and configuration to get at least auto updating Jekyll versions and I'm keeping the home page as is, i.e. mostly static. During the conversion I also found several blogs with a bad title that Jekyll was burying as a result.
I will be slowly converting all of this to pure HTML and will remove the posts directory once that's complete.I also need a better text editor or GitHub app that will let me edit blog posts, doing this in the browser while accessible is not fun.
I'm sure someone will say use WordPress, Medium or whatever but I've used several blog platforms and a lot of my worst formatted posts are bad conversions from those. Either that platform started charging, or changed their own versions that broke my formatting. If years ago I had written this all in HTML and accepted a simple layout, I would still have posts formatted as they were a decade ago (granted in those days browser rendering changed frequently, but this is no longer the case and the web is relatively well-versioned).