Setting this thing up

i’ve been looking at starting a blog for… oh, eight years? and i’ve never quite been able to think of a name, and i’ve never quite been able to think of a theme, and there was just always something better (easier) to do.

but i was nerd-sniped into setting one up for sean2bo - someone mentioned the joys of finding the blog of some guy on the internet that’s just chalk-full of interesting stuff and usually no more than a couple of handwritten html and css files, he mentioned wanting to write a blog, and i went “oh! i can do that!”

Twelve hours later not only have I created a sandbox for him to blog in, I’ve ended up setting up this site for myself.

anyway, some background on the process and why github pages at all

some background on the process and why github pages at all

i’m using jekyll because i tried to use it before: when i was living in a place where i had both a server (repurposed desktop) and admin access to the router i decided to get into self-hosting, and got so far as to set up a jekyll-based site and write a few posts before i realized that i don’t really want to pay for a domain name, or pay enough attention to securing my server that i probably should, if i was to actually self-host at scale.

so that project died quietly.

github pages is basically the solution to that - sure, it does negate the benefits of self-hosting (most of which, for me, are the joy of a do-it-yourself approach; the ideological ones are there but not quite as strongly), but it’s free, and i don’t need to mess around too much with ruby, while still being able to use vim to write my posts, and set up the site structure as i’d like.

(ask me, some day, about my opinion on wordpress- and google-sites-based blogs, and you’ll realize what a truly unfortunate sense of blog-snobbery i’ve developed.)

so i set up the initial sandbox on my github account (this blog), wrote some truly terrible css for it, and let him clone it.

but it seems like a shame to just let the hours i spent figuring out how to deploy a github pages site go to waste, so i think i’ll sink a few more (hundred) in, writing posts and troubleshooting this blog.

that’s what you call efficiency.

I can - and will - delete any comment at any time for any reason I want. Write comments that won't make me want to delete them.

Also, refer to people with initials or with their github username. I'd like to maintain the thin veneer of possible anonymity this site currently has.