how I made this website
Right, so, blog, thus blog.
This website is my little github pages site hosted here using jekyll and a custom fork of the no-style-please jekyll gem theme, which is set up as remote_theme. It took about a day composed of an afternoon, a late night, and then another afternoon ending in me writing this now (is 6:30ish the afternoon? I am making pizza and dinner is evening…)
Everything about this site is completely standard other than the few changes I made to the theme basically. My previous site was hosted on Squarespace, which is slow and expensive1. I don’t think that should come as a suprise to anyone who would feel comfortable doing a little tutorial-ing and git stuff to get a website up, but I think, at the time, I justified using it because I felt a little swamped trying to work on projects to build my resume (pretty much just the beer bottle towards the end) and closing out the semester. I figured that I wanted to build my own site properly-ish, but I wouldn’t have the time so “let’s just use something prebuilt and not make a project out of it and redo it later when I have time”. If I’m remembering right, I think it took me about as long as this place did, and this place is fast and free.
The reasons why I forked the theme were pretty small ones, like I wanted the description to show on the homepage, which the theme had disabled, and I wanted the home button to go to /home instead of /, because / redirects to /portfolio with the plugin jekyll-redirect-from because I want to make it easy to hand my site to people and say “go to alectremblay.xyz to see my portfolio” without them having to select it from the menu. I don’t know, some of the stuff I hear from people like “employers go through 10 bajillion million resumes a day and don’t want to or have time to _____” so I thought I’d build in the time save. I had also already given the website like that on my resume and didn’t want it to not bring people to the right page. I also added the ability to put content in archive pages and changed the font to Atkinson Hyperlegible2. None of these changes took more than a minute, at least until I understood how to make them. I guess that applies to a lot of code stuff…
My setup for writing for and for maintaining this site going forward is on my PC in vscode. I have a little one line batch that saves me from typing bundle exec jekyll serve that puts the site on localhost:4000 so I have vscode on one half and the preview on the other half of the screen. I also have the vscode github plugin setup, so it’s basically three clicks to push the local version live, big fan of vscode plugins. For editing the theme, I never downloaded it, just made my tweaks on github itself.
So yeah, friends I told about this who said “huh, I need to build/rebuild my own website, I should really get on that”: it’s not that hard. Get on that.
(you’re supposed to end stuff with a call to action, right? that’s the call. right there. I called you out. buh-raaaaa )
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It’s supposed to be plug and play but I don’t think I could figure out how to not make the site entire break on mobile. Like, for this, it was just: google the question, copy and paste the css and make an awfully organised .md file, and boom, beautiful-ish website, don’t @ me. ↩
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Which is super cool by the way. It’s like, supposed to be super readable, or like, hyper legible or whatever, and the braille foundation designed it and made it free and I learned about it from this youtube video. ↩