Working Around Jekyll's Safe Mode

2011-08-21

github has this nifty service github pages and under the hood they use jekyll. The concept is quite simple, you maintain a jekyll site lives in a special reopsitory and they transform it to plain HTML using jekyll.

The biggest problem I have with jekyll is that it is quite limited. To combat this jekyll has a plugin system, where you add extensions and modifications under the _plugin folder in your jekyll site. A feature that I kind of "need" to operatre this site.

The problem with github pages is that they operate jekyll with the "safe mode". This disables the plugin feature and renders github pages unsuable for me.

Since I am a cheap sod, I still want to use the service. The trick is that you don't need to have a jekyll site and can just put plain HTML pages in the service. The simple solution, tha master branch only contains the processed HTML files and the actual jekyll site is stored under the branch raw. You can see my current stup.