McGarrah Technical Blog

Jekyll Content Plumbing: Permalinks, Reading Time, Excerpts, and Redirects

· 11 min read
The invisible infrastructure behind a Jekyll blog — how permalink structure, reading time estimates, custom excerpt separators, pagination, and redirect handling all work together. These aren't glamorous features, but getting them wrong breaks SEO, confuses readers, and creates maintenance headaches.

QuickSight Vanity URLs: Serverless Edge Redirects with Terraform and CloudFront

· 12 min read
In a large enterprise, 'Where do I log in?' is a surprisingly expensive question. I built a serverless redirect engine for AWS QuickSight that eliminates login friction, costs under six cents a month, and has run in production for over a year with zero maintenance.

Upgrading Jekyll: Two Years of Cascading Breakage

· 7 min read
Every Jekyll upgrade broke something downstream. Ruby 3.0 dropped webrick. Jekyll 4.3 broke SASS imports. Dart Sass 3.0 deprecated color functions. Node.js 24 forced all GitHub Actions to update. Here's the full upgrade timeline and what each one taught me.

How the Sausage Is Made: Every Feature Powering This Jekyll Blog

· 15 min read
After 130+ posts and two years of Jekyll customization, here's the complete feature set behind this blog — from Mermaid diagrams and KaTeX math to GDPR compliance, Pandoc exports, and the SEO pipeline. A look behind the curtain at what it takes to run a technical blog on GitHub Pages.

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