Blog Site

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Blog Site

This project is this site itself. It’s a simple blog site which will serve as a platform for documenting my journey through various projects. The development, deployment and hosting of the blog site is the “project” that it documented here.

I wanted to put up a site to host a resume and share some other content. I also knew I’d rather move to other more intereting projects than spend too much time on the site itself. I had some exposure to using Jekyll sites from collaborating with my brother, Erik, and friends on our indie-community-radio station, The Pork Chop Express. I especially liked the simplicity of building a Jekyll site with GitHub Actions and hosting it via GitHub Pages. I found a nice theme I liked in Hydejack, a fork of the popular Hyde theme. I like HydeJack’s support for JSON resume, dark theme support, and several other features.

Process

Getting Started with Jekyll

I struggled with some dependencies issues with Jekyll. Especially when moving between development on my WSL2 development environment on my main home PC and my M1 Silicon MacBook Pro. After a little bit of time I did get Jekyll working with Ruby v. 3.3.3. The more interesting result was that this caused experience caused me to look for a version manager for switching between versions of Ruby. I chose to go with asdf, using the asdf-ruby plugin rather than the several alternatives, chruby, rbenv or rvm. I primarily chose asdf for its reusability as it supports many languages and tools with its existing plugins.

Jekyll itself is extremely easy once you get your development environment set up for it.

Summed up, my setup looked something like this:

(from root dir of jekyll site content, where _config is located)

  brew install coreutils curl git\
  git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.14.0\
  echo -e "\n. $(brew --prefix asdf)/libexec/asdf.sh" >> ${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zshrc\
  asdf plugin-add ruby
  asdf install ruby 3.3.3
  asdf local ruby 3.3.3
  bundle install
  bundle exec jekyll build
  bundle exec jekyll serve

Site Content

Getting the site content filled in is, of course, the lion’s share of the work here. As far as structure goes, I won’t describe it here, as it’s covered in Jekyll documentation and the specifics of the Hyde & HydeJack’s themes. I ended up spending a bit of time using some AI powered tools to prepare graphic design related content for the site, e.g. background removal for headshots, resizing of images for logos/favicon. For these purposes, those tools worked amazingly well; just a shame really that kids these days will never get to experience the patience-training tedium of isolating content with the pen tool in Photoshop.

Domain Registry

  • This is extremely simple. Still, I’d never done it before for lack of any need. I spent more time searching for which domain registrar to choose. I landed on one, and from there it’s a very simple task to set up DNS to point the GitHub Pages site to my new registered domain.

Delivery

For the initial iteration, I chose just the very simple suggested Jekyll workflow action. It’s as easy as creating that workflow yaml, and setting the config, i.e. run that build on push to main, and tada, CI/CD. Neat.

Take-away

learnings:

  • finding asdf for version management
  • low-cost of entry initial experience with GitHub Actions
  • Forced to use some AI tools (Canva, ChatGPT-based Image Generator for site graphic assets (icons, headshots, logo))
  • finding the JSON Resume format
  • Having to think closely about sensitive content control if maintaining this project as a public repository

Project Details

  • Date started: 14-07-2024

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