I should have explained more, yes you might have realised by now the surrounding language your environment was in, if it was only ascii or similar, might have caused ruby to only work in that encoding and not be able to deal with extra characters.
You should be able to export LANG=<locale>.<encoding> and export LANGUAGE=<locale> in .bashrc or .profile (whichever will be executed on bash long) and then ruby will work in a more flexible encoding that allows jekyll to parse the files properly.
Check out my post here, we’re in #OpenTechSchool in freenode.
I’ll see about trying to address the issues you guys have raised, good collation of feedback!