Building the Site

I decided that it would be a good exercise to build my own site for this journal rather than just doing some slight customisations on a Wordpress/Ghost or other CRM. It seemed like a good place to start for the first web development I've done solo, and it hasn't turned out too badly (I hope)!

When I started to look into the tools that I could use to build this site, there were way too many options, but when I found Jekyll it seemed like it would be perfect for me. Not only it is a really easy way to get a static site up and running, GitHub hosts the site for free on their Pages service. It was a bit intimidating starting out from scratch though, so I started to look for templates to base the site on. After a few months distraction with Uni, and building a separate site using Jekyll I felt a bit more confident in building something largely from scratch.

So after blundering around trying to build something from scratch, and playing around with designs I decided to based my site off another site and then progressively change it. This helped me get over the felling of being totally overwhelmed with having to put the whole site together. I settled on using the Hyde theme by @mdo as an initial base for the site. As the site is also a profile of me I decided to change the landing page to what you see today, sort of a summary of me, a mini resume I guess.

I haven't done much yet to customise the journal aspect but that is a work in progress as we speak and there will be updates progressively pushed through as articles are put onto the site.