Updating the Markdown Engine

Switching to the kramdown engine

I received an email from GitHub Pages saying that starting March 1st, only the kramdown engine would be supported, and code highlighting would need to switch to Rouge. Reference: github-pages-now-faster-and-simpler-with-jekyll-3-0

So I had to dig into it — mainly to sort out code highlighting after switching to kramdown. I really didn't want to use the Liquid tag. (⊙o⊙)…

Update _config.yml:

highlighter: rouge
markdown: kramdown
kramdown:
  input: GFM

It seems you can now just wrap code with ```, which is consistent with standard Markdown syntax. The remaining step is to remove anything Pygments-related.

function test() {
  console.log("notice the blank line before this function?");
}

GitHub Pages now only supports Rouge, a pure-Ruby syntax highlighter, meaning you no longer need to install Python and Pygments to preview your site locally.

Great news for Rubyists, though I'm more familiar with Python. (⊙o⊙)...

After making the change, previewing at localhost didn't work. But once pushed to GitHub Pages and accessed via the custom domain, everything was fine.

Also, if you want to include a Liquid tag literally, for example:

{% raw %}

{% for post in paginator.posts %}
    <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}

{% endraw %}

you need to wrap it in the {% raw %}{% raw %}{% endraw %} tag. Check the source of this page on GitHub for details.