Intro to Website Creation

Late-Night Shenanigans

I had the bright idea one very late night to buy my own domain name and create a website for myself; something simple I could use to put on resumes and profiles. Turns out it was a bit more complicated, but also simpler than what I had imagined. Personally, I’m really used to the full-stack nature of websites, so that’s what I had in mind coming into this whole situation.

Initial Issues

I did not, however, take into account the server usage I needed to develop such an application. Theoretically, I could use a variety of free online servers to cobble together a website, but it was too much hassle for something I honestly didn’t want to put all that much time into.

I could’ve also used some sort of website designer like wix or wordpress (or any other CMS) with a hosting site to take care of my site, but I’m a cheapskate, so that’s out the window. I eventually settled on using Github Pages to host my site for free, which would also make taking care of the CI/CD portion of the site much more streamlined since they serve simple websites out of the box with Jekyll.

Jekyll

I’ve never used a static-site-generator like Jekyll before, but it’s setup was honestly a breeze. There’s a vast amount of tutorials on Youtube to follow and create all sorts of different types of websites; all of which helped me get this one started.

Jekyll is really based towards making static sites like blogs or portfolios as simple as possible using the markdown format as a basis for pages. I hadn’t worked with markdown since my college days, so it took a bit of time getting back into the rhythm of things, but it was also relatively straightforward.

The only thing I didn’t like all that much was the original theme that came with Jekyll, Minima. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a vast and stable theming system for most use cases, but I felt it lacked some more sophisticated features such as colorful theme skins and built-in support for images in pages, as well as specific page layouts to serve those images.

Minimal-Mistakes

For that reason, I changed the theme of the site to Minimal Mistakes; and I haven’t looked back since. It offers everything I wanted and more. Thus, we have the website that you’re on today.

I might come back every now and then to make more posts, but I’m not 100% sure just yet. I’ve never really considered myself a creative type.

Anyways, Cheers.