Building this website

tags: programming - webdesign

It makes sense that in the first post on my new website I would talk a bit about the technical side of it.

I used to have another site which I built about three years ago. The aim was to get up to speed with new HTML5 features, as well as learning some Javascript. I was also hosting the site on my Raspberry Pi B I used as a NAS in my house. Therefore I built everything from scratch since I was looking for performance and a small footprint. That site served its purpose, but the web has changed a lot since then. In particular, I was tempted by the promise of free hosting of static sites offered by GitHub. Site deployment is a breeze (just git push) and it is powerful enough to suffice for what I need.

Since static site generators are very well suited for a personal website, I was going to use one. Initially I was tempted by Pelican as it is built in Python and uses reStructuredText, which with I am familiar. However, because of the integration of GitHub pages with Jekyll, I thought I’d give that a try.

After a few hoops:

• configuring ruby on windows - failed
• using ruby with linux subsystem for windows - success!
• figuring out how to configure Jekyll - takes forever for a newbie
• building a personalized theme (I used Cayman for reference)
• pretending that I know what colours work well together

I was left with the current version of the site, of which I am happy enough.