As noted in the last post, Jekyll does not have a built-in commenting system, but its themes often allow comments to be managed by connecting to third-party services such as Disqus and similar platforms. The problem with these services is that they can stop working overnight (as happened last year with Muut, which no longer even has a website), or they have opaque usage policies and user data collection practices.

After the first part dedicated to installing and configuring Jekyll, this second part of these annotated notes dives into developing a Jekyll site using a pre-existing theme. On the other hand, developing a theme for Jekyll from scratch is far beyond my expertise, but those who can do it don’t need to read these notes.

This post is not meant to be a detailed guide on installing and configuring Jekyll; for that, there are excellent guides listed below.1 Instead, this post is a commented collection of notes I took while developing melabit.com/posts/en. They are the result of days and days of trial and error, changes in direction, and research to find the right command. These notes were useful for me to remember what I had done and how I had solved the issues that arose from time to time. They might be useful for you to get everything done more quickly and smoothly.

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. In the past few months, I have written four posts about macOS Sonoma bugs (a complete list is at the end of this post) because I found it unbelievable that this macOS version was released with such glaring issues in the Finder and in disk management.

– Source: Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash. As I mentioned in my last post, leaving the WordPress comfort zone wasn’t easy at all. Going from focusing solely on writing something interesting – while a team of system administrators and web programming experts handled everything else – to having to do it all by myself was a massive leap.

– Image generated by the Microsoft Designer AI. Eleven years ago, when I started writing in this personal space, I never imagined I would stick with WordPress.com for so long. WordPress.com is a convenient and reliable blogging platform, but it has always been ill-suited to my way of working. Over time, I learned to live with these limitations, but the idea of changing platforms never left my mind.

– Image generated by Flux Image AI. In the last month, the blog has been quiet, but behind the scenes, the work has been intense and will take shape in the early days of the new year. Stay tuned! In the meantime, enjoy the end-of-year celebrations, hoping that 2025 will be a year full of discoveries, growth, and happiness.

– Source: Apple Support. Experimenting can sometimes lead to issues. That’s exactly what happened to me after a failed macOS installation, which resulted in a big question mark with a prompt to visit the Mac restore page. For some years now, when a Mac is unable to boot macOS and cannot even run macOS Recovery to repair or reinstall the OS, the only way to bring it back to life is to enable DFU Mode (Device Firmware Upgrade). This mode is stored in ROM and cannot be erased under any circumstances.1

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. Sonoma’s bugs never fail to surprise, and here I describe a fresh one, which luckily has been fixed in Sequoia. Take a new MacBook Air or Pro, where you’ve just installed Sonoma, or a MacBook where you erased the startup disk before installing Sonoma (what happens when simply updating from a previous version might be different).

I’m not the kind of guy that longs for the “good old days” which, in truth, weren’t that great anyway. Life expectancy was twenty years shorter than it is today, infant mortality was high, and those who survived aged faster – people in their fifties already looked elderly. Food may have been more natural, but it was scarce, forget year-round meat and fish. In some parts of Italy, winter diet consisted mostly of polenta and little else. Homes were cold in winter, and cars turned into ovens in summer. And the list could go on.