As I used my current unemployment situation to finally start to play around with Jekyll to have some kind of blog or portfolio website on my old and dusty phantasus domain.
I used this domain for years, 10 years at least, when I judge it by the hardcoded 2014 mail address now as some kind identity parking place for my old nickname “Phantasus” in the coding and hacker community. Phantasus is the god of dreams and I like to dream, that’s the mundane reason why I chose it.
Maybe it even shows a little bit of some kind of gigantomaniac tendencies, which also could explain why I did not start using Jekyll for years. Because back then I wanted to have some stack, which is stable and which I control. I iterated over a couple of tries of writing something like Jekyll myself. Once I wrote a static version with simple html files, then I used a static site generator for Chicken Scheme, then I wrote something in Perl, because I worked at the time at a company which used Perl for some internal scripts.
Good for me, that Jekyll improved in the meantime and went over different versions so that the design of it is more streamlined now. Hopefully that means it will be less of hassle.
As I’m like most programmers could not produce in a day or two something which would look decent, attractive, beautiful designwise to the common people who use the Web these days. Because of that I did finally what is everybody doing these days who is not a web designer, I chose a couple of themes and slammed them into Jekyll.
Because I did not want to include a RubyGem for the themes I copied them
over by hand. By doing that I also could ensure that the included JavaScript
is not tracking the user or loading some dependencies behind my back as I
wanted to simply guarantee that the visitors to my blog or my “professional”
personal site are tracked, so that I can refrain from displaying them a “cookie banner”.
The themes I used were:
The nice thing about them is that they also somewhat allow switching between the “main portfolio” and the “blog part” of the website. Still, I could work on making them more seemless, an exercise which I could do in the future. For my current humble standards they are enough.