The components: GitHub, Jekyll, Visual Studo Code, a local implementation of Jekyll and all the courage I could muster.
Personal Branding (A Place to Call Your Very Own)
This won’t be the first website I’ve built, but it might be the last.
Who am I kidding?
It won’t be the last because one of the best ways to keep those increasingly rusty tech skills up to date is to build a website using (at a minimum) a semi-current stack.
Here’s the Stack:
- GitHub Pages (for now, this could change to a hosting service like DreamHost)
- Jekyll
- an open source Jekyll theme named Minimal Mistakes
- Visual Studio Code
- GitHub Desktop
- Git
- Ruby and Jekyll installed locally
Those are the essential bits.
The Git ecosystem made getting started with Jekyll a breeze. And if I planned to stick with the out of the box look and feel (LAF) of the Minimal Mistakes theme, I could’ve written content directly from the GitHub UI and that’d be that. But I knew I’d want to tinker and explore and make changes to the LAF.
While the GitHub Pages automatic build after a commit feature is fantastic, there’s a decent bit of latency between changes and publishing those changes.
So I followed the steps outlined in the Jekyll documentation to get Jekyll running on my laptop. I also installed Git, GitHub Desktop and Visual Studio Code. This setup provided nearly real-time
With my local workflow defined, I read through the Minimal Mistakes user guide, browsed the code and began the tried and true trial and error method of overriding CSS.
When learning, I think it always helps things “stick” if you build something as you learn. It’s a loose implementation of the “see one, do one, teach one” process:
- See one: I read the Jekyll docs, reviewed the code, and reviewed the content
- Do one: I built a site in Jekyll
- Teach one: I’m writing about my experience, describing what I did a) for the benefit of others b) to expose gaps in my knowledge