My new housemate, Alfie, runs a pretty cool blog with a lot of updates on their personal projects and online projects, and it got me inspired to keep a similar blog of my happenings, I’ve always been a big fan of archiving everything I do, and keeping a blog will allow me to easily archive the processes I followed for my personal projects.
research
I’ve dabbled in web development before, as well as blogging, when I was younger I ran a terrible blog which I never archived that I mostly posted “Top 10” lists, terrible creepypastas that 12 year old me and my friend Joe wrote together, and other uninteresting things, I ran this original blog with WordPress and thus began my research there.
I found that WordPress was just not customisable enough for me, although my programming skills are lacking I don’t appreciate a service that attempts to sell CSS to me, and even though I will struggle to customize by myself, the lack of options to do so turned me off of WordPress. It was perfect for 12 year old me, but 25 year old me prefers the ability to do what I want with my website.
I then moved onto researching self hosted options, websites really are just html files when it comes down to it, but my disturbing lack of cyber security skills definitely turned me off of that. An example that comes to mind was during the active time of the Karlson Wiki, another project I ran, which I hosted myself. We had a user register to our site one time with my full legal name and address, that was a bit terrifying. Additionally with my skills in website development being not the best, I thought that maybe building a site from the ground up would be more effort than it was worth for a small personal blog.
And then I remembered hearing about Github Pages! From what I could remember, they were essentially just websites hosted on GitHub. Easy to setup, free to host, markdown is built in, customisable. It seemed perfect, so I searched on Startpage ‘blog on github’ and came across this post by Chad Baldwin.
creating the blog
The process was shockingly simple, I opened the blog template, named it 7lauraa.github.io, made sure it was set to public, and created the repository! Github does take a couple of minutes to update, so making the initial changes can be a bit of a slog, but it really was that easy.
I started by editing the _config.yml file. I changed the title to “laura’s blog”, the author name to “laura”, and the description to “i write things here” (surely i will come up with something better), and then added the social media pages I wanted to link, I added my email, my Github, my instagram, twitter, youtube (if you also follow this to create a blog with Github pages, note that your youtube username in the config file must include the @ for the link the work).
I attempted to channge how the site looked, before realising that I was out of my depth, so then I started work on this post that you’re reading right now! Mostly so I could get a grip on how to create blog posts, and keep up with my markdown skills which generally are okay, but there are things I needed to search up, specifically whether it was []() or ()[] for hyperlinks, and which number of #’s created which level of heading.
rework
I kinda didn’t love Chad’s blog template (no hate to him) so I moved to a different one that seemed a lot more customisable, called lightspeed, it was really simple to switch over, and using Github allowed me to download this blog post and upload it to the new layout easily!
Regardless, I enjoyed the creation of the blog, and hopefully I will continue to write about my personal projects on here!
Thanks for reading, Laura <3