When it comes to websites I prefer something clean and basic. I’m sure there are themes for Wordpress or blogger that fit this but I have a slight unexplained aversion to them for a personal site. I’ve used blogger for small project blogs no problem, but there is something I can’t place why I don’t want it for a personnel blog.
I recently came across Jekyll and similar tools for automatically generating static html pages. The idea really appeals to me, I don’t have a need for any dynamic content and the restriction will hopefully produce a cleaner site. There was also a strong advantage that GitHub offers free hosting for Jekyll sites. This allowed me to quickly deploy a simple website for free with no adverts!
Hosting on GitHub also gives me the opportunity to learn git. The company I work for uses Perforce for code version control. It has a very centralised structure unlike git, so hosting here will give me the opportunity to expand my dev skill set.
I stumbled across this theme beautiful-jekyll that looks like what I want so I have started with that and will slowly customised it to my tastes. Naturally this site will slowly evolve as I get more familiar with the various tools so apologies in advance if anything doesn’t quite work yet.
I’ll try to post more thoughts and experiences I have with creating this site, as it has been very helpful to me to read other people’s experiences.