- 15 Nov 2016
The one bad thing about hosting a static blog is that implementing comments means you:
Outsource, letting some other site handle it (like Disqus) Come up with some sort of crazy contraption to force a comment system into a static blog Spend hours scouring the internet to see what other people have done. Obviously, outsourcing wasn’t an option - Disqus looks nice and all, and I’m sure it would be fine for a lot of people, but it just wasn’t what I wanted. I like having full control of my data. My next idea was to find a free hosting site and write some crazy PHP and set up a SQL database to set up comments.
But this got me thinking - how did sites handle comments before all this dynamic content was commonplace? A careful google search led me to an amazing blog post by Eduardo Boucas on how he solved this exact problem.
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- 12 Nov 2016
I’ve been wanting to fix this blog for a while now, and I decided in the process that I am awful at web design/programming. Haha, well, the first step to being kinda good at something is kinda sucking at something, right?
In my scouring of the internet I discovered that a lot of static blog sites used Jekyll to generate their site. At first, I figured it was nothing more than another insta-blog program where you just dump some content into a folder and it spits out a blog - but holy cow it is so much more than (and can be exactly) that. I’ve only scratched the surface of what it is capable of, since I don’t have many skills in the web developement category (yet).
I originally attempted to create my own Jekyll theme - and successfully recreated my original blog format. Unfortunately, I remembered (after spending a good deal of time working on it) that I didn’t really like the look/feel of my original blog - and trashed it.
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