Ahh, to have a blog published. Such satisfaction. Look at me, a published author! It wasn’t always this way, however. Once I decided to blog, and had stockpiled a few ideas to write about, I didn’t know where to put it all. Or how to put it there. Vague recollections of “Blogger” and “Blogspot” crossed my mind, but I hoped things had progressed since my last foray. Where do we go from here?

I asked my manager Steven his thoughts, and he recommended Jekyll. Jekyll is a “basic” framework that can be used to generate static content quickly, without needing much infrastructure (eg database, backend services, etc). It’s a breeze to get up and running, and would add another tool to my belt, so I jumped in. And so far, it’s giving me just what I need. This site may still resemble a Soviet-era military manual, but my primitive design skills are to blame for that (I’m working on it! I will talk about it!).

Without diving too deeply into the implementation weeds, my blog consists of:

1. A site forked from a simple Jekyll starter project on Github. Jekyll already has pure “site generation” capabilities, but the starter project provided some basic hooks for social media, analytics, etc.

2. Hosting provided (for free) by Github, via my “personal site”.

Here’s the post I used to get this up and running, and it went almost flawlessly

My impressions thus far:

1. Jekyll is slick and easy, with awesome documentation. Compared to the bomb shelter you’re viewing here, their site is very inviting. Jekyll is painless to get up and running locally, a mostly brainless exercise. Painless and brainless - my cup of tea. One downside is that it doesn’t offer much “dynamic” power (eg, database-related functionality). In this day and age, however, you can find a web service for about any purpose, and I haven’t needed any custom backend. I’ve got my social hooks, analytics, a robust commenting system, etc, just by hooking into 3rd party services. My needs may change with time, but I’m happy as a clam at the moment.

2. Jekyll uses Markdown, an easy to learn abstraction of HTML. The Jekyll framework generates HTML from Markdown source, so anything you can’t do with Markdown, you simply handroll your own HTML. I mentally lump this into the “higher level language that abstracts things away” category (similar to Coffeescript). I secretly feel inadequate for not knowing these languages, and am thankful for the opportunity to learn Markdown here (please keep this knowledge of my fear of inadequecy to yourself).

3. Along with #2, I’m determined to gain a deeper understanding of Sass/CSS, and how to control where all this stuff is placed on the screen. I currently know enough to be dangerous, and would compare my CSS skills to a club made from a large stick. I’d like to slowly whittle that down to a scalpel.

4. Github hosting is pretty sweet. My blog is versioned controlled, and to update/publish to my blog, I simply push changes to Github. No brainer.

As part of my journey, I’m going to document noteworthy additions and lessons learned. They might be stupid and trivial, or represent a whole new level of awareness. Here’s this week’s “What Did Marty Learn About Blogging and The Web” (better known as “WDMLABATW”):

Thanks for reading, and if you want to see Disqus in action, please leave a comment below!