This is the forth incarnation of my personal blog.

The first one was on blogger when I was in highschool.

The second one was on a self hosted installation of wordpress, but eventually my billing for the underlying VM failed silently and that was deleted off the internet. As far as life lessons go, losing a couple years worth of posts is a pretty cheap price to pay to internalize the value of frequent backups, but I digress.

The third one was built on github pages with Jekyll using the Scriptor-Jekyll-Theme. Overall I was very happy with the hosting, and the theme was fine. What didn’t end up working for me was that most of the computers I own run windows and the dev experience to publish a post as I had set it up before required updating markup files in a linux environment (or WSL).

Which brings us to lucky number 4: For the current incarnation, I kept the github pages hosting. I switched up the theme to Beautiful Jekyll and resolved to make the writing experience fit my setup a bit better.

I will spare you the boring details of the setup in favor of two main takeaways:

1. You can run jekyll blogs from Windows

The docs seemed to claim that this was possible:

While Windows is not an officially-supported platform, it can be used to run Jekyll with the proper tweaks.

In practice, RubyInstaller did install Ruby, but failed out on installing gcc and make so I had to install those manually.

2. jekyll-admin is awesome

Part of the reason I even got started down this project is that I came across jekyll-admin, a plugin that adds a local CMS interface for you to manage posts.

The editor itself is pretty rudimentary, but I was dying for even an 80% solution to this problem.

I spent a couple of hours this Sunday with it: Tinkering with the theme’s default parameters, the editor’s settings and jekyll’s strict mode for reference verification. In the end, the final writing experience isn’t that far off from what I used to have in my old wordpress setup.

Which is amazing! Having a free staticially built site with a streamlined writing flow is the best of all worlds.

But let’s see how it goes!

P.S: I’ll get around to tinkering with the color scheme and the CSS eventually