I have a wonderful (well… ish) new blog and domain name! Incredibly shiny and new! It’s amazing actually having built (some) of the functionality and look of this, I’m using Jekyll, a static site generator, which handles the heavy lifting and lets you still play around a lot at the same time. I’m hosting my site at Github Pages and got my domain from 123reg.

I started making the website at hacksoton (the fifth one, I’ve been to three, and you should come to the next one), and I learnt a lot despite getting little done in the venue, which is super frustrating! I assume that’s going to be an ongoing theme for as long as I’m still in the ‘lots that I do not know I do not know’ phase of my coding journey.

I somehow made my file have root permissions, but that meant that I got to learn some new terminal commands. One that I sort of knew from Learn CLI (command line interface to the uninitiated) the Hard Way waschmod, which changes the access permissions of directories. Checking to get the link, I thought I knew it from the aforementioned link but it doesn’t look like he covers it, it’s still useful as a resource though. There’s a good link here and I might write a post about it and chown so I cant get my head around it.

I’ve learnt that if my wifi is bad I should probably step away from Github: wifi issues can affect the error messages that you get, and as soon as I was away from the download ravaged connection of hacksoton I could clone and pull again.

I’m writing this in markdown, which I love, it’s just so simple and easy to edit. Markdown has simple commands that make the blogging experience a lot smoother, and between Markdown and Jekyll I get to avoid styling every page individually!… Learnt that what I’ve always known as ‘alt-text’ is actually the title, damn you Tumblr!

As you can probably tell this site is far from perfect, and the things I still need to fix are:

• the theme
• nav bar
• the width of the blog posts
• spacing of elements on the page
• mobile version (it’s sort of repsonsive, i’m using Bootstrap, but my footer has messed it up it seems.)
• the colour scheme (which is based on Sublime Text if you couldn’t tell)
• finish adding logo credits
• add fancy javascript effects like parallax
• add a header image
• sort out post styling

There are probably many other things too but I think I’m allowed to be pleased with what I have so far!