Website Development

Thought it would be an interesting project to build a website using GitHub Pages to replace my carrd website. It actually turned out pretty well!

I learned a few things in the course of this project.

I learned about my system.

• I’m writing this right now on an old MacBook running High Sierra. In the process of installing Jekyll, an app used to build a kind of website (that I never used), I had to do three things that taught a lot about the inner workings of my system:

1. Installed Homebrew. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS, which basically means it helps me install and manage apps and such.
2. Updated Ruby. Ruby is a coding language. It’s what jekyll uses, but the version that comes with High Sierra is older than what jekyll needs. As such, i looked around for a solution.
3. The solution i found was rbenv. It’s an app that lets you install a second version of Ruby, right next to your native one. After some setup, I found out that there are two lines i need to enter into the terminal each time I open the terminal in order for rbenv to work (and by extention, for jekyll to work), which has prodded me to learn scripting. after I learn scripting to simplify entering those two lines, I will probably write about it next time i make one of these “Arch’s Musings”.

I learned about GitHub.

• I’ve been interested in getting into coding recently, especially after begginning my dive into the world of Linux and FOSS (free and open source software). GitHub is a pretty important thing to understand for what I want to learn, and GitHub Pages works by having the website be hosted on a regular GitHub repository, so I got to learn how that works.

I leanred about how a website is made.

• GitHub Pages hosts static websites, which basically means that it sends a few files to your computer, and that’s it, as opposed to hosting the website and sending the result to your computer. This has some upsides — namely less resources used, because it only needs to send you a file instead of generating the website each time — but it also has downsides — namely restricting what you can do with it (you can’t update it real time, like for example I can create a post on Tumblr and it will show up, but if this was a static site, I’d have to go add this post into this source code of the website.).
• I also learned about HTML and CSS. I’ve previously had very little experience with HTML, and none at all with CSS, but I ended up learning some of the basics of those languages with I coded my website (from scratch, no templates!)

Legend says I will one day write about updating the website.