CREATING A STATIC BLOG

My first post! Let's see how this goes...

5:00 AM (AEST), August 19th, 2021

So I finally started a dev blog, a lot more effort than I first imagined, yet so simple...

For the longest time, I've wanted to create a blog. I wanted somewhere I could talk about my development, to help with my motivation, an insight into the development of a project once I progressed further, but equally important, a place to talk about my life or at least my nerdy life. The problem is, making a blog when you use GitHub Pages isn't as easy as it would seem, near impossible in the traditional sense.

See GitHub Pages is a static way to build a website, meaning you can't have databases, complicated designs, PHP or even run things like WordPress to handle the blog experience. Making a blog on GitHub Pages wasn't going to be easy, at least from what I could understand. I would most likely have to generate one locally, create a post through it and copy all the statically created files back into the Git repository each time I wanted to make a post. Generating the blog isn't the worst option, as projects like Jekyll can make this a simple and easy process. But I do feel like you lose a bit of control.

One of the main hurdles I found when trying Jekyll was getting it working with my current Website as I didn't want any rebuilds or redesigns to make it work. Sadly for me, it didn't seem worth that extra work and instead, I elected a basic approach with standard HTML and CSS to create a base post and blog page template and leave it at that.

It isn't all bad, I can use markdown to help create the <p> and <h> tags but yes, basically, I am writing a new page for every post, adding to the blog page for every post, all in HTML and its manual. However, it does keep things simple, still getting my hands dirty in code, even though it is only HTML, and I get to keep everything looking exactly how I like it. All in all, I did enjoy the experience of writing my first post using this method. It was fun.