New website! (Migration to GitHub Pages)

I’ve finally updated my website, though not in the way I had hinted at in the old website, shown below:

On that old site, which was a static web page (well, actually a Node.js app running on Heroku that just served up a static page), I mentioned that I planned on making the site more dynamic and moving to Microsoft Azure…I lied.

Well, kind of. The site might feel a little more dynamic (like a basic blog), but it’s still statically generated via Jekyll. As for hosting, I’m actually just using GitHub Pages. The old website used Bootplus as a CSS framework, but here I’ve switched back to regular Bootstrap. Overall, I’m more confident that this set of tools is more appropriate and managable for what I have in mind.

I would also like readers of the website to be able to comment on the posts I make. However, due to my opinions on responsible data collection and privacy on the web (see About), I couldn’t just use WordPress or Disqus. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to manage my own database and deal with security concerns. As a compromise, I’ve decided to use GitHub issues as a method to comment on my posts. Yes, this means that I’m letting GitHub track their users onto my webpage, but I was planning on embedding some Gists in my posts anyways. Also, I expect that readers of this type of material are coders themselves, who probably use and like GitHub, and I personally trust them more than other web platforms. I followed this great tutorial to implement this here.

Things like style are a bit rough for now. While the website looks a lot more plain and boring compared to the old one, I’m hoping that this new setup will make it easier for me to publish some original content, so stay tuned!