I’ve decided to use github pages and jekyll to host my website and to create it. Some of the reasons behind this are:

  1. It’s free!
  2. I didn’t really need content management like Wordpress; all I needed to do was to show some static pages.
  3. Jekyll seemed learnable over a weekend and very customizable.
  4. For someone without much frontend experience, writing in Markdown is very straightforward!

Some of the downsides to this approach have been:

  1. While Jekyll is easy to setup, making it look nice takes some time.
  2. Each Jekyll theme is setup slightly differently, and you might as well override everything.
  3. If you don’t have frontend experience, there’s some additional terminology and setup.
  4. Writing in Markdown, while straight-forward, isn’t a very great writing experience, e.g. no spellcheck. Any maybe I just need to use a better IDE/plugin?

As an amusing example of additional setup required, while setting up one of the dependencies for Jekyll (gem or bundler?), somehow the ls command in terminal lost colors for different files and directory types. I had directories show up in biege, media as purple, etc. I had to manually set the colors again, but it was annoying.

If anyone stumbles on here, and are curious in learning more about what I used, check out:

Finally, my previous posts are on Medium, which I should probably port over some day.