And now (hopefully) I have my google analytics up and running thanks to this answer which is further explained in this blog post by aforementioned answer-er. Many thanks to him, and those working on jekyll. I am really starting to appreciate the stack as it is extremely intuitive and well documented. While they aren't really in competition as they are for completely different domains, I consider jekyll to be another great victory in the non-rails ruby web tech area.
Oh, I almost forgot many thanks to web-mode which I just found, as i was getting tired of seeing all sorts of funky errors in my .html from the jekyll templating and such. This particular snippet after installation worked wonders:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.html?\\'" . web-mode))Also useful was this list of supported languages in literal blocks with org-mode.