Changing Jekyll Themes

Today I migrated this blog from using the Jekyll theme called jekyll-now to another, Chirpy.

The simplest way to do this is forking the repository of the theme you want to use.

I went through a bit of pain trying to set this up, as I was having trouble getting GitHub Actions to deploy the site. The cause of the issue is that my previous jekyll-now repo, was being hosted by pages. I’d suggest if you want to try out a few different themes, then you should delete your repo containing your site first, before forking the repo of the theme you wish to use. Be sure to take out any content files such as blog posts first, Personally I’d suggest keeping them in a local folder seperate from your site’s files, and copying your files over every so often, coupled with a seperate cloud storage e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox.

Something like this should work for your local copy, it could run daily, weekly etc.:

Linux

mkdir -p ~/my-blog-backup
cp -r _posts ~/my-blog-backup/

Windows

mkdir %USERPROFILE%\my-blog-backup
xcopy _posts %USERPROFILE%\my-blog-backup\_posts /E /I

Tutorial

This video is a very good tutorial on setting up your own to at least build and deploy.

I hope this helps!