How I built this site

08 Jul 2020

I figured it was about time I join the bandwagon and built my own (minimalist) website where all my projects and interests come together.

I figure a good ‘first blog’ would be to explain how I built this site. Hopefully this helps other people who are looking to do something similar.

My requirements

Here is a simple list of my requirements for a personal website:

• Low cost / free
• Minimalist design
• Low maintenance
• A simple way of adding a new blog post
• Ability to preview changes before they are live

What I used to make this site

There was no need to re-invent the wheel - there are literally 1000’s of blogging platforms out there.

With that in mind, I went looking for a solution. Here are some of the platforms / tools that considered:

• Wordpress (didn’t want the bloat)
• Medium (wanted more control)
• Voice (wanted more control)
• Static site generators (some complex, some looked great)

When I found GitHub pages I didn’t see the need to look further. I use GitHub daily and it looks pretty simple to get things set up.

The stack (summary)

• namecheap - domain registration (davidplumridge.com)
• github pages - website hosting
• Jekyll - static site generator
• Visual Studo - IDE

Step by step

1. Create the GitHub repository
   • Create a repo called <your-username>.github.io
   • Full instructions here
2. Setup the custom domain davidplumridge.com
   • Create a file named CNAME in the repository like this one here
   • Setup the DNS records with namecheap. Full instructions here

3. Install Jekyll. I did this by following the 3 commands on their homepage here

4. How I customized the site;
   • You can find themes here
   • Updated includes here
   • Updated layouts here
   • Created extra pages like this one here

Some issues that I faced (and the resolutions)

• Cant find header files for Ruby here
• Unable to install Jekyll on OSX here
• Unable to resolve type ‘size_t’ here

Summary

It’s easy to preview changes locally (by starting Jekyll) and then push.