Published on 23 Sep 2017
Somehow I am never really happy with my blog design, and I thought it’d be a good idea to roll my own design. It seemed a good opportunity to see how I can develop my own site with Jekyll on Github Pages. And now that it is online, I wanted to share the process. It is far from complete, but right now I think it is a good place to start.
Note: the design is not perfect, I know. I’ll work on it, I promise!
I wanted to learn how I can make a proper Jekyll site work. I was not satisfied with the available Jekyll designs. I just have too much free time. I don’t really know, I was just interested. I usually just find some good design and use that, but this time I wanted to figure out how I can design something that would work (also, I couldn’t find anything that would fit my ideas, so that was a big motivator). And I thought it should not be hard, so it seemed like the right idea to do at the moment.
I think there are two different things that need to be talked about when we mention blog design. One is the design of the functionality of the blog, and the other one is the look-and-feel.
Interestingly these two actually have something to do with each other. I wanted a very minimalist, content-focused blog. But this also meant that I wanted to focus on the blog itself, and not on any other features, like pages, categories, tags, pagination, whatever. So the decision to create a minimalist experience influences what features I implement, and how.
I knew that I do not want pagination, because I find it inconvenient, and at the amount of blog posts I create in a year, that should not be an issue (I have to promise myself that I’ll celebrate the 100th posts - if I ever make it there). So pagination was gone, and then I decided that for now I do not need any of the other above mentioned features, because I do not have content for them, so I will just delay creating them. The same is true for e.g. having a footer.
So what I have now is a bare minimum of a blog. We’ll see where it will evolve. Oh yeah, I decided that I’ll put all my ideas into the github repository as issues, because that seems to be a convenient place to collect every idea that I have.
If you have any request for posts, just raise an issue there. If you have any questions, just post a question into the AMA repo.