Although I have been maintaing my blog on Github Pages, powered by Jekyll since 2015, it was just recently that I finally bought a domain name for my own.
A quick overhaul and update was done just before the relaunch. In contrast another personal web project took around 4 months to finish.
This month when I decided to purchase a domain name for my personal website, I decided to make the “hidden” bio page as the home page and move the blog under the folder “blog”. While this was quite easy to complete, I also decided to upgrade from the ‘Poole’ theme to the more friendly ‘Bulma’.
Back in 2015, when I had created this blog, I created it on Github Pages which is powered by Jekyll. Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware static site generator. I found it easier to manage and have more control as a developer when I moved from my original Blogger blog.
It was an 8 hour work in a single sitting to migrate and configure to Bulma theme as well as do a little reorganization for the site. This process was made easy because of the ease of maintaining the configuration with Jekyll. Sure I was stuck at a few places and had to go through Jekyll and Liquid templating language.
The main obstacle was installing Ruby and setting up the Jekyll gem on local for testing the changes. Ofcourse since Bulma is my favourite and go to CSS framework, it was very easy to update all the styles.
Finally, after spending a hectic day on it, I turned my attention on purchasing a domain name. After comparing a number of services, I finally chose Namecheap. The process was very fast and the customer service was excellent to setup all the configurations to point to the exisiting Github Pages location, given this is the first time that I have ever bought and configured a domain.
Use the below link and get a discount on
Namecheap if you are planning to get a domain of your own.
I work on some of my Open Source projects, and tutorials under the Organization Ae App Labs. There was a static placeholder site hosted on Github Pages for it. Ever since I learnt about Svelte back in 2020, I wanted to apply it on a love project. I fell in love with the simplicity and you should check it out too.
Back in December 2020, I began the long process of redesigning the organization website into Sapper (An application framework powered by Svelte). There were a number of design revisions, development and features that were added in a span of 3-4 months until the site was completed.
Do check it out for more details on some Open Source Projects, Case Studies and Tutorials!
Learning
Working on both of these projects, I was able to learn some new concepts as well as more about other
- SCSS - It would be so hard to go back to normal CSS
- Svelete and Sapper
- SVG - Excellent for graphics and animations
- Greensock Animation
- More about Jekyll and Liquid templating language