Hello! Welcome to my first blog post. I want to use this post to lay out my goals for this blog, and discuss the tooling I used to create it.

Blog Goals

My goal for this blog is to provide a place for me to highlight and discuss any projects I work on in my free time. Over the past year I’ve started several small projects which could make good blog posts (physics sims, small games, etc.). Whether I decide to retroactively add those projects as posts remains to be seen, but at least now I will have a venue to discuss any projects I start in the future.

I may also use this blog to showcase non-technical things from my life too. This could include book reviews or highlights from my other hobbies like playing guitar and hiking.

Tooling

For those curious about the tooling; I’ve had this website up for a few months and used it as an opportunity to build my web development skills during my job search. I wanted to start with the basics so at first I wrote it entirely in pure HTML/CSS. I was inspired by the simple design of Jonathan Lam’s website (lambdalambda.ninja) and wanted to create a similar aesthetic.

This site is hosted using GitHub Pages. I’ve been really impressed with how easy and seamless it is to host a personal website with GitHub Pages. It’s literally as simple as creating a GitHub repo with a certain name and creating an HTML file. I can definitely see why it’s the go-to hosting service for programmer portfolios and similar sites.

The decision to write this website in pure HTML/CSS and host with GitHub Pages really determined the tooling I decided to use for this blog. At first I tried out Pelican (getpelican.com), since it’s written in Python (my mainstay programming language) and I am a big fan of Thomas Caswell’s work, and he uses it for his blog (tacaswell.github.io). But in the end it proved very difficult to keep my existing formatting and styles with Pelican, since Pelican really wants you to use one of their themes rather than plain HTML/CSS.

So I decided to go with Jekyll instead (jekyllrb.com). I hesitated to use Jekyll at first since it’s a Ruby program and I have never used Ruby and didn’t really want to install another high-level scripting language on my system (I already have Python, Perl and Node.js), but so far it’s been great. Jekyll works well with regular HTML files and renders them as-expected, plus GitHub Pages is powered by Jekyll so the integration there was totally seamless.

Overall I can definitely recommend GitHub Pages + Jekyll with some basic HTML/CSS as personal website/porfolio/blog stack. I still have a lot to learn about Jekyll and may post some future updates when I understand it better.