Troubleshooting and Common Issues

Jekyll error ‘429 Too Many Requests’

When building the site locally in frequent succession, Jekyll might complain in the following way:

 open-uri.rb:364:in `open_http': 429 Too Many Requests (OpenURI::HTTPError)

Cause

In order to retrieve the current number of citations on Google Scholar, we use the nokogiri gem to scrape http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&cites=5053469347483527186 and extract the number of citations (for more information see _plugins/googlescholar.rb). Frequent scraping attempts can hit Google’s rate limit and lead to a soft IP ban.

Solution

Either visit http://scholar.google.com in your browser and solve the Captcha or deactivate the googlescholar.rb plugin temporarily, e.g. by renaming it to googlescholar.rb_, or commenting out its contents.

Jekyll crashes on Windows

Some of the flags (arguments) for running jekyll build or jekyll serve are known to crash on Windows, e.g. --safe -l or --detach. In most cases there is no workaround, because the features are simply not implemented or available in Windows, so run the command without the flag.