The Blog Begins
As a new year begins one must make an effort to continue their personal development by following creative endeavors, while I've had blogs in the past I found that I had gotten out of the habit of creative technical writing and decided to take this opportunity to try out Jekyll with a new design and format for the blog.
Jekyll has been surprisingly versatile and easy to setup, not to mention vastly more secure than any dynamic blogging software that exists. Within a few hours I had a design and some test posts put together, and within a few days something resembling a website had emerged from a surprisingly small number of files.
The format I've chosen is to have more in-depth articles interleaved by links, quotes and words that have piqued my interest throughout the month allowing for a frequently updating blog without the necessity to write a long genuinely interesting article every week.
My favorite things about Jekyll are:
- Everything is plain text files
- GitHub flavored markdown
- I can edit everything offline using Sublime Text
- Liquid templates are very similar to Django's
- Rich user-defined YAML metadata for posts
- Everything is compiled to static files
- No limitations on structure or organization
- Plugins like
jekyll-press
The source code for this site can be found on my GitHub account at http://github.com/harryr/logicista. Many thanks to Cal / foxx for providing much needed inspiration and getting me started with Jekyll by providing source code for his blog, after hearing him evangelise it in comparison to WordPress I just had to try it out.
Colors were taken from Flatdesigncolors.com and the typeface used throughout is a free font called Maven Pro, the rest of the design is my own work taking inspiration from multiple sources while trying to maintain a clean, light and minimalist feel.