Exclude Folder or File from the Sitemap for Jekyll(Hydejack) Blog

in Blog on Github Pages, Jekyll

Webmaster tools (such as Google Search Console) use sitemap.xml file to get help crawling. The file work as content for the blog. Jekyll (and Hydejack) use jekyll-sitemap plugin to automatically generate sitemap.xml file. You can check mine from here.

However, one may want to exclude a specific file or folder from the sitemap to prevent being crawled by search engines. For example, Hydejack excludes the assets & licenses folder from the sitemap.
At least it tries. It fails to do so because of the invalid value.

In my case, I wanted to remove the google-search-verification file & Naver search verification file from the sitemap.

So today, I’ll show you how to do so.

WSL2 - Avoid using Jekyll on Windows Filesystem

in Blog on Blog, Github Pages, Jekyll
WSL2 - Avoid using Jekyll on Windows Filesystem

If any of you find Jekyll compile-time(bundle exec jekyll serve) is too slow on your Windows - WSL environment, make sure that your blog is NOT located on Windows Filesystem!

TL;DR

WSL2 is very slow in Windows filesystem (/mnt/c).
Clone your blog repo to the Linux filesystem (starting with ~/).
Access Linux filesystem via explorer with a path like below.

\\wsl$\{distro_name}\home\{user_name}

# My case
\\wsl$\Ubuntu\home\lazyren

Use Utterances/Giscus for Jekyll Comments System

in Blog on Github Pages, Jekyll
Use Utterances/Giscus for Jekyll Comments System

Disqus is used as the default comments plugin for the Hydejack and most of the static sites. But I had some issues with Disqus, so I looked elsewhere to find new comments plugin.

  1. Disqus loads slowly.
  2. link within the comment is broken.
    The most important reason I chose to move on. Disqus automatically adds prefix starting with disq.us/url?, the problem is…. disq.us is not responding so the link gets lost.

Utterances uses GitHub issues to save & display comments. So you have to give proper permission to the GitHub bot. But once you set things up correctly, it works very smoothly and fast. The only downside I’ve encountered so far is that it requires a user to log in to GitHub to write comments, and there is no default reply function. (All though you can mimic reply using > & @…)

Giscus is almost identical to the Utterances except that it uses GitHub discussion instead of issues.
I have once again migrated to Giscus from Utterances. It seems ‘discussions’ is more appropriate than ‘issues’ to place comments.

Creating Tag List Page

in Blog on Github Pages, Jekyll
Creating Tag List Page

Since many tags are not listed on the sidebar, I’ve always wanted to have a page where I can see all categories & tags I’ve used for the posts. And visitors may click on it to navigate related posts. To implement a tag list, you only need to create two files to have a such page.

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