Nothing beats Medium when it comes to blogging. Its overly simplistic, minimal and its true WYSIWYG editor put itself ahead of the races. But there comes a time, when you might need a self-hosted blog. Maybe it’s for a project, or as a life journal. I wanted something more personal.

My original thought was to make a WordPress site that I could get up and running within hours to get the ball rolling however, I wanted to be able to personalize the web-spaces and create dynamic pages. For that I would need something custom.

So, I got to work on my really basic HTML, CSS, and JS static page to begin until I realized how painful it was to create a post and keep everything uniform. It turned into hours of checking CSS and watching YouTube videos until I could get the layout I wanted. I soon realized the importance of Bootstrap and proper CSS containers. My site became an online resume that I would update every semester as I found stuff to edit.

After taking a Web Application Engineering class at Stockton University I was able to increase my development skills and realized a simple online resume was way to normal of a thing. In order to stand out I needed something more. An entire Angular app would be way too much work that I was willing to put in. The site did not need to be that complex.

After some more research and guidance from a few friends I came across Jekyll, a true gem written in Ruby. I had some Ruby experience with scripting in Kali Linux however I needed to understand more basic functions to get the gems and such needed for the site. After a lot of trial and error I was able to patch together a site that had the perfect setup for blogging. I will create a separate post with how I got the site running and snags I ran to along the way. There is still much to learn but every day I feel the hours I spend are no longer worrying about layout for the site, rather the content I make. Until next time!

-Greg