Oh hey this blog looks different!
Yes it does! I’ve gotten frustrated at the look, feel, and crunchy aspect of my old template, and refreshed it.
What once was a fork of Clean Blog Jekyll is now a fork of Thinkspace that I’m using as my base remote theme, myrtle.
What I learnt
While some custom themes work well in themselves and expect you to fork them to use them as a template, they don’t work well as remote templates. Because I have separate repos for all my subpages, I need a remote theme else I’d have all the duplicated code.
For thinkspace, I had to move the sass files from the folder defined in _config under sass_dir – assets/scss – to just _sass. That got rid of the issues with not finding files (which I think is because remote-theme doesn’t listen to custom sass folders, but don’t quote me on that.)
I also learnt that while jekyll 4 has features that allow sites to inherit preconfigured defaults, but this is specifically a Jekyll 4 feature. GitHub Pages is still on Jekyll 3, so this feature doesn’t yet work. (Sources: stackoverflow thread, github thread). The (temporary) workaround is to have your theme’s _config.yml in a state where you can easily bulk copy/paste and adjust where needed. Or, you know, not use GitHub Pages and use something like netlify, but for now the copy/paste works for me.