Version 0.1!

Took some trial and error and 25 commits to get this barebones site up. Combining advice from several tutorials when you don’t know what you’re doing is a messy way to get started!

Getting the site to build

I kept having an issue where GitHub Pages didn’t want to run Jekyll’s build stuff on my home page. I’m assuming my issue is that when I copied some code from a tutorial, it contained special characters that prevented GitHub Pages from recognizing the Jekyll fore-matter:

---
layout: home
title: Home
---

Once I got that fixed things started to come together.

At one point I wasn’t sure if I needed to add the Jekyll build CI Github Action or not. Having that build action on my repo gave me access to Jekyll’s build logs, which was nice for debugging. However, the results of that build weren’t actually being published. I think it was basically just verifying that my site would build and could be used as a setup step in a testing workflow. GitHub pages automatically runs a Page Build action on your site within a few seconds of every push to the master branch. You can see the status of that on the commits page of the repo with the little green check marks after each commit.

Learning the minima theme

Next I had to figure out available themes and their layouts. I switched to minima since it’s the default and read up on the minima documentation. Some of the examples I initially did had me creating my own layouts and css files. I ended up deleting those and letting the theme run the show. I had a little confusion on the differences between the metadata supported by minima 3.0 vs. the current stable release that GitHub supports, minima 2.5. This affects the author and social media metadata. Looks like if want to add reddit, I’d have to fork, customize, and override the social.html include file within minima, and add an SVG icon, etc, which doesn’t seem worth it. Since I’d like to continue using what GitHub supports, the more stable option would actually be to do a PR on the public minima repo, then wait a few months until GitHub supports it! Also not worth it.

The bigger lesson I’ve learned here is that some features (like layouts and metadata) are offered by most themes, but some are theme specific. If I decide to swap themes, I might have to go through and change a few metadata things to get everything working.

Plans

Some questions I’m asking myself:

  • What is this site for?
    • Meta-posts like this one about making a site about making itself, lol
    • Programming stuff?
    • Tech Hobby stuff?
    • Thoughts about games, podcasts, TV shows, etc.
    • Editorializing about life, the human condition, philosophical parodoxes
    • Sharing artistic things, music, poetry, dad jokes, etc.
  • How do I do images/media?
  • Do I put a picture of myself?
  • Is my About page too much?
  • Should I do a portfolio / CV? What do I include there? Lots of my NASA stuff is sensitive, so I’d have to be selective.