- 22 Oct 2017
Ok, so it turns out I still can’t stand using a premade theme. I decided to look again at Hugo themes, and found XMin. Clean, simple, and a good basic idea of what I wanted this blog to look like. Cracked open the source code and was playing around… one thing led to another and this is what I ended up with.
Really enjoying working with Hugo - haven’t even played with any of the cool powerful features that it has, but I am very impressed with how easy it is to modify and change things. Everything is laid out in a good, logical sense which makes it much easier to customize and play around with things.
Things that still need work:
I’m not sure about the monospace font for the titles and headers - I like it, but that doesn’t mean it looks good! Ha.
The Tags page looks off.
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- 16 Oct 2017
Man, I really don’t do a lot of work on this blog - maybe because I am not a web programmer but I can see when this blog does not look very good.
Well, I officially gave up on web design. Yep! Turns out, I should probably leave that to the professionals. Oh, and I also decided to heck with Jekyll. It was cool, and worked well - but searching for a premade Jekyll theme was a chore. Not to mention getting all the silly ruby nonsense to work. Even tried playing around with Ruby and seeing what all the fuss was about. No thanks.
Stumbled upon Hu(go) - another static blog generator. Well, Hu(go) is blazingly fast, and has a ton of cool features that you don’t have to even try hard to get to work. Not to mention the themes are easily searched through, easily switched, easily customized/expanded, and look darn good.
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- 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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