The other night I finally figured out what was wrong with the pictures on this blog! They weren’t loading in my posts, and then recently my avatar stopped loading, too. I had been meaning/trying to fix this for a long time. It turned out to be pretty easy to fix.

To fix the avatar, all I had to do was edit the img tag on my default.html file to say <img src="/images/catVersionOfMe.jpg" />, then on the _config.yml file set the avatar to the name of the picture, no file path. At some point I want to learn about the double braces in the file path (they’re not showing when I compile the html for this page, I think I need an escape character to see them). Is that an html thing, or is it specific to Jekyll? I’d really like to get a better understanding of how Jekyll compiles this blog.

To fix the pictures, it turns out I was just using the wrong file path. I had been using the entire file path on my pictures, but I needed to use the relative path. All of my pictures are in a folder in the top directory called “images”. The blog posts are in a folder called “_posts” so I just needed to use the path ./images/picture, where picture is the name of the picture, with its file extension. Note the single period to get to the parent directory, not the usual two periods. Everywhere I’m looking right now with a Google search says to use two periods, but somewhere I found it said to use one, and that’s what worked.

Finally, I also figured out how to make my links open in a new tab by default, with exceptions. I’d already known that to make them open in a new tab by default I just needed to add a base tag to the head element of my default.html file, <base target="_blank">. Yesterday morning I found out for the exceptions I just need to add target="_self" to the a tag. I did this for the links on my website, too, but I was too lazy to delete the target="_blank" from all the individual tags. Of course they’re not hurting anything by being there, but at some point I would like to go through and delete them, since I’m trying to show off the code I wrote. Then the next thing I want to try to do for my website is create a uniform head element for all of my pages, where I can add exceptions for the home page.