About
I’m just figuring stuff out. It’s working out OK, I guess.
This is me following tutorials, trying things, breaking things, abandoning ship, reappearing in a shiny new dinghy and trying again.
First, back in november 2020, I followed the steps over at guides.github.com and got a simple blog up and running. I wanted to be able to make changes and test locally, so I followed this guide for setting up Jekyll and this guide to setting up a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll. I got confused at some point, and ended up cleaning out the whole repo and just creating a new one with jekyll.
Things started making some sense, I managed to get everything working and found a beautiful theme called Minimal Mistakes which I managed to bend to my will. All seemed good for a short time. Then something got updated somewhere and I suddenly crashed hard on version dependencies. Host system (Arch linux), Ruby, Jekyll and GitHub all colluding to make things difficult. I gave up for almost a year.
When I picked things back up, nothing seemed to have changed. Dependencies were still a problem. I scanned my old posts and I saw that I had considered Hugo, which apparently rapidly gaining ground as the most popular static site generator. I tried importing the old blog from Jekyll to Hugo, tried on a few themes, and even though I ran into problems with looks and functionality it all seemed to click. I didn’t understand how the themes worked or how to customize them, though. Even so, things seemed simpler: local testing with on the fly rendering of changes, great docs, decent file structure, Go instead of Ruby…
So here we are, mid to late 2022, trying to move to a new platform, keeping the old posts alive and building a theme from scratch. This might mean you will see more html/css/js-stuff here, but it will most probably just be posts about making things not break.
All the time, learning how all the bits and pieces work and documenting it all as I go. Though the documenting part needs some work.