McGarrah Technical Blog

The Small Things: Polish Features That Make a Jekyll Blog Feel Professional

· 8 min read
Dark mode, print stylesheets, haiku error pages, author bios, and the archive page — none of these are glamorous features. Each one took less than a day. Together they're the difference between a blog that looks like a default template and one that feels like someone cares about it.

VS Code Markdown Preview: Closing the macOS vs Windows Context Menu Gap

· 4 min read
On macOS, VS Code's right-click context menu gives you 'Open Preview' for Markdown files. On Windows and WSL2, you only get 'Open With...' and an extra click. Here's how to close that gap.

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.

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