Spent most of my time today just trying out different blog sites and solutions. I think I found one I really want to try, only I’ve had some issues getting it up and running. It’s a piece of software called Jekyll that essentially sets up a website for you, based on a language called Ruby. The whole system is very cool in the nerdiest way possible. It’s more customizable than any of the other solutions and it lets me use better templates AND it has some add-ons that will let me migrate my blog from WordPress easily. The best part? The software and even the hosting is free by using a github.io domain. I would pay exactly 0 dollars to run my blog. It’s really great in every way … except it’s been a pain in the ass to get it working. I got the basic template up, but I can’t seem to get any third party templates up. When I found a template I really wanted, it took me like three hours to solve a particularly annoying dependency issue, but immediately after fixing it I ran into another one. I was trying to set it up on a laptop running linux because I assumed the package managers would help me avoid dependency issues in the first place, but it looks like I’ll have to manually install some stuff anyway so I guess I’ll try it on my Windows machine tomorrow. I gave myself all month to get the new blog going, but it’s still frustrating to run into these roadblocks every time I try something new. All that programming experience I gathered never seems to help me avoid this type of problem, only to fix them. I do end up fixing them though … usually.
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley
Dangerous Day Job 