Miskatonic University Press

Jekyll 3

14 January 2014 jekyll emacs

One more post about Jekyll, for now, then I’ll stop for a while.

Timestamps

More about timestamps. I noticed that the posts in the RSS feed were all dated to midnight of the day they were posted! Because Jekyll doesn’t know about exact times unless they’re defined, it has no time to specify. I don’t like that! RSS feeds should have proper times in them. I use Planet Venus as my feed reader, and if a post is stamped midnight then it’ll be farther back in the stream of news, and I’ll probably miss it.

I fixed it adding a pubDate variable to the YAML front matter in a post, for example in this one:

---
layout: post
title: Jekyll 3
tags: jekyll emacs
pubDate: 2014-01-14 00:15:00 -0500
---

Here’s a gist on GitHub showing what feed.xml looks like (minus the YAML header):

Notice how if post.pubDate exists, it’s used as pubDate in the RSS feed, otherwise Jekyll’s inferred date is used.

Jekyll was forgetting about the time zone in the output and setting all timestamps to +0000 or UTC. Turns out there was a bug filed aboutthis and it’ll be fixed soon. Until then my RSS feed reads like I live in the UK, but so be it.

Tags

I tagged posts back to 2012 where I could, and made a page listing all the posts by tag. I used this StackOverflow answer as my basis. I thought about fooling around more with tags, then thought I’d wait until I actually need them.

Metadata

I’d like to get some metadata encoded into the pages … I’ll look into schema.org and Dublin Core (where again StackOverflow is helpful, pointing to a list of valid meta name keywords in HTML5).

Essay Directory??

But—what the hell? There’s a keyword “EssayDirectory:” “Defines a custom description of websites listed in EssayDirectory.” The example is:

<meta name="EssayDirectory" content="Helping students find legitimate essay services.">

The documentation says:

Custom EssayDirectory Meta Extension

Using the special <meta name="EssayDirectory" ... > extension in your homepage’s <head> element you can specify a custom description of your website that will be used to describe your listing on EssayDirectory.com pages.

Essay Directory looks like an essay mill.

Did the W3C accidentally allow the definition of an HTML meta name meant to help academic dishonesty?

Updated: 14 January 2014