blog v1

This website was made using Jekyll against my personal wishes, not that I have anything against Jekyll, but I didn’t want to learn yet another web framework. I wanted to host it on Github Pages because it’s free and easy, and I couldn’t figure out how to make one not using Jekyll, so here I am…

I’d like to create a blog that I would enjoy reading and following. It’s going to take a few iterations to get the structure that I want, but for my first version, I want to use Jekyll’s category feature for each of my ongoing projects and hobbies. I suspect that there will be quite a bit of cross-functional content, so categories will be reserved for ongoing topics of exploration, and tags will be used to categorize posts with common content or themes. For example, I may create a sailing category that I update regularly with updates to my sailing adventures, which may contain posts about a funny sailing story (tag: stories), or a post about a game that helps me memorize sailing terms (tag: game dev).

ChatGPT taught me how to autogenerate category landing pages using collections.

Also wanted to mention that styling with CSS is a pain in the butt. Every time I think I get it, another curveball gets launched at me.

For future improvements, I’d like to add audience interactivity and enable comments - it would be really cool to have people comment on individual lines or sections on a post and start a thread there (kind of like a Google Doc), but I might start off with just a single thread per post. Might be cool to have a continuous feed of selected or latest comments. I would also like to add a feature for people to subscribe to individual categories that they’re interested in, or be able to filter out posts by category. I think I need more content before that becomes compelling, though :)

You can check out the website source code here. It would be cool to link each blog post to a specific commit but I’m not big brain enough to do that yet (okay, it’s this one. yes I cheated and edited this retroactively. and yeah, there was a deployment bug…).