After installing the 0.12.1 version of Jekyll I started to get an annoying error that the encoding was wrong. I’m really picky about saving all my files as UTF-8, so I couldn’t for the life of me figuring out why it all of a sudden threw that kind of error. I even reinstalled 0.12.0 and sure enough, that version worked without a problem. The solution is to set the default language and encoding before running Jekyll, ie. set LANG=en_EN.UTF-8 for Windows or export LANG=en_EN.UTF-8¹ for Unix. Since I’m a lazy person I of course implemented it in my Rakefile, similar to this:

require "rbconfig"

LANG = en_EN.UTF-8

if RbConfig::CONFIG["host_os"] =~ /mswin|mingw/
  SET = "set"
else
  SET = "export"
end

task :build do
  system "#{SET} LANG=#{LANG} && jekyll"
end

The RbConfig part is actually a neat trick I found a couple of weeks ago. It apparently works better than using RUBY_PLATFORM since it picks up the actual OS rather than the Ruby platform.² I’m not sure that the require part is really necessary but it doesn’t hurt either. You can of course just create an alias too if you’re only using Unix, ie: alias jekyll="export LANG=en_EN.UTF-8 && jekyll" or something like that.