Personal Site

WHAT

This very site!

WHEN

July-November 2015

WHO

Me

WHERE

The internet

WHY

I am vain and want to share my writing and catalogue my projects

HOW

I may have to do a complete write up on this later, but suffice it to say this site has had quite an oddysey. It started out as a Django project, which I undertook not only to create a portfolio (prior to my job search), but also to get a modicum of experience with web development since I had zilch at that point. The journey of this site from not-quite finished Django thing to beautiful Jekyll blog has already been told, but the addition of the ‘projects’ section you are now parousing is itself quite the tale. To keep it short:

1. The site was based on the Minimal Mistakes theme with some customization, and I ended up plundering the same designer’s Skinny Bones theme for the project page layout - thanks! I also plundered my old Django site design for each project’s layout - never throw out unfinished projects folks.
2. Introducing a whole new category to the site complicated things, and forced me to bite the bullet and start using plugins. And by using plugins, I mean heavily borrowing from others for things I needed, such as category based navigation and plugin-based tag pages.
3. Finally, having bitten that bullet I needed to say to having GitHub build my site from source - plugins are just too dangerous. But, with a bit of guidance that switch was pretty easy.

Next up, custom photo gallery! I highly recommend using this framework for your personal site, the design of it is simply fantastic.