After putting it off for so long, I finally decided to join the early 2000s and put up a personal site for myself. With that decision came the question of what to build the site with. I settled on Jekyll for generating the site, Foundation for the design framework, and Github Pages for hosting the site.

Site Generation

I was fairly certain I wanted to stay with something Ruby based. This counted out Wordpress, but I didn't necessarily want to build the site with Rails either. I've heard the name Jekyll tossed out numerous times, along with praises of its static site generation and being blog-aware. This seemed like it would be a great fit. The site was to be simple, mostly a blog with just a couple other static pages.

Jekyll was at times frustrating, especially when trying to extend it. For the most part it was okay though. It just took coming to terms with the way Jekyll works versus typical dynamic site development with something like Rails or Sinatra. Finding answers to questions online was at times difficult as many of the top results were for old blog posts, or Stack Overflow questions, and Jekyll may or may have not changed in that time.

My one big irritation with Jekyll was that for something that is supposed to be blog aware, why on Earth doesn't it generate category and tag pages? It knows about tags and categories, but doesn't do anything with them besides that.

I wanted to initially use Slim for all my templates. Unfortunately I quickly ran into some issues when trying to nest include some templates. This was due to Slim being whitespace sensitive and the rendered templates containing newlines and whitespacing that didn't match with the current indentation level. I may go back to this in the future and see if changing the Slim rendering options will allow me to use it everywhere, but for now I just went with a mix of Slim and HTML.

I had to use SCSS for my CSS, because, well basically if you somehow don't know what SCSS is by now you really need to go the site and look, as you're really missing out. I currently compile the SCSS files with Compass.

In the future I may replace the individual gems and processes for asset management with the jekyll-asset-pipeline gem, which I didn't come across until I was almost finished with the site.

Design

I knew for the design that I wanted to make a site that was responsive. Go ahead and view this site on your phone, and desktop. It's all the same markup, but displays differently in each.

My CSS framework of choice is Zurb's Foundation 4. The defaults are pretty good, and it makes it easy to build a nice responsive site pretty quickly. Even though I think you can get a nicer looking site out of the box with Bootstrap, I really like that Foundation is built with SCSS. This allows me to use @include and @extend statements in a way that doesn't involve plastering Foundation classes all over my markup.

There's a little bit of Font Awesome for some of the icons around the site. Icon fonts are pretty cool, my only frustration with Font Awesome is having to add specific class in my markup. I would much rather have my own semantic class names.

It's not directly part of the site itself, but I run LiveReload. It's a huge timesaver, and makes the design process so much less tedious. It removes the need to refresh the browser every time a styling change is made.

Hosting

Since the site is all static HTML pages, I didn't want to even bother with hosting myself, and having to worry about server crashes, outages, etc... As such, I decided to host the site using Github Pages. I'm using custom plugins and code with Jekyll, so I can't take advantage of the automated site generation offered with Pages. It's not too big of an issue though, I just deploy the site using a simple shell script.

What's Next

As much as I love Vim, writing posts in it can be a little bit of a pain. Plus, sometimes I'm not at my primary machine, or have a development environment present. Currently this means I can't write a post, because I have no way to publish it.

To alleviate this problem and give myself a web based editor for my posts, I'm going to use Prose. Then I'll setup jekyll-hook on a development server to receive a post-commit hook from Github and redeploy my site.