We're live! š
The last time I had a functional āblogā, it was probably my Livejournal from middle schoolā¦ which is certainly not something I want to relive. However, I have been considering creating a professional blog since I started studying Ruby back in January, and Iām thrilled that it is now live!
In addition to providing me with a space to document my journey through studying programming, the process of the setting up this site was its own learning opportunity.
The Process
Jekyll is the perfect static-site generator for me, given that itās in Ruby. It was also fairly straightforward to set-up, and my first real difficulty came from attempting to change my theme to the lovely klisĆ©.
Since I had already deployed my site with the default Minima theme, I had to git clone the klisƩ theme to a newtheme branch in my repository, and then merge it with the master branch. Simple enough, but there were some bumps in the road and I got the opportunity to learn how to navigate git related errors, such as refusing to merge unrelated histories. But thanks to some stackoverflow sleuthing, eventually the new theme was up and we were good to go.
Once I was revelling in the beauty of my new theme, my greatest challenge became the fact that none of the information in my _config.yml file was showing up. Figuring it out took some trial and error and assistance from Josh of Turing School; as it turned out, I hadnāt properly nested the values in the author dictionary in my file. The process was an excellent lesson in debugging, and also in the sensitive, whitespace-averse nature of yaml files (on that note, Iām finding the YAML Basics post on this site to be particularly helpful.)
I still have a lot of work to do on this site (cleaning up the rest of the files that come with the theme, buying and setting up my first domain), but for now Iām going to enjoy my progress so far. Stay tuned!