README

Background

This site serves as a creative outlet and a place to document my technical journeys, projects, and personal interests. It’s gone through a few iterations - most using WordPress, but going back further it was custom code (e.g. SimpleSite) and now Jekyll.

Why GitHub Pages / Jekyll?

A year or two ago, I came to the conclusion that paying for hosting on a site that I didn’t update much was kind of a waste. At the same time, I’d had a site since I was around 12 and wanted to keep that streak going.

Enter GitHub Pages: free hosting that allows the use of a custom domain name. The only drawback is that you can’t do anything server-side, but, for right now, that’s fine.

Design

Visual design is one of my biggest weaknesses, but I tried to lean into it here. The core aspects I wanted:

  • Minimal
  • Responsive
  • Accessible
  • Modern, with a retro / cyberpunk feel

I think the mono-space text on a dark background captures the idea pretty well. I also tried to keep it mostly text-based rather than iconography / imagery to satisfy the minimalism.

For the font, originally I was using courier, but it felt too “old”. I opted for using CommitMono since that’s what I use in my terminal.

The hardest decision, though, was the color-scheme. Typically I’ll use either full grayscale or black as the main color, paired with reds or greens. Instead I decided to take inspiration from a close friend and use purple - his favorite color - as an accent. I think it came out really well.

I also found that using just opacity changes for hover effects on links/buttons worked out nicely.

Development

Aside from the visual design, I also wanted to keep the payload as small and simple as possible. I allowed myself to use jQuery and font-awesome for the rare icons I included, but other than that, I wanted to build out styles and functionality by hand to avoid bloat.

The other large payload is Google Tag Manager. While I don’t really need it, if I end up blogging more, getting statistics for it will be interesting.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this has been a successful experience and I’m happy with how it’s come out. I have a couple additional pieces of functionality that I may come back to implement later on as well, but that’s TBD for now. My next goal will be to start regularly adding content which is OOS here.