After a lot of of hesitation I finally upgraded Jekyll to 1.1.2 from using the 0.12.1 version. Quite a lot has changed and the team is doing a great job with it. However, my old SET LANG hack didn’t work. I tried using another hack which involves using chcp 65001 instead but that didn’t quite work either. Whenever I tried to launch the default server WEBrick it blew up. There were errors, errors everywhere. I wasn’t going to give up so I came up with another solution.

I now use an external server while Jekyll just auto-generates the site. I use a small Node.js web server app called nws which I use all the time anyway. I also use Grunt for task automation (here’s the source code). I also have a project called “Teeny tiny static server” which I created some months ago. It uses Rack, Rack-Rewrite and Thin to create a fast prototype web server, which may be an alternative to using a Node.js based solution. It’s not perfect but it’s better than being stuck on an old version.