New Site

It has been awhile since I have updated the site with a post for my blog, but you may have noticed that a lot has changed. I have put a lot of effort into a complete site redesign and I have also moved my site away from dynamic pieces (I was using b2evo for my blog and gallery3 for my photo gallery), to a static site. For anyone interested, I will outline how I replaced those tools.

One of the conditions I had when creating my new static site, was that I could seperate the content from the layout, and keep my blog posts in a simple text format. Keeping it in an easy to read format makes it perfect for using with version control, and I can use different branches for drafts.

I looked at a number of different static site generators, but they all seemed heavily focused on just blog sites, and are not designed for full sites with multiple sections. I also wanted a static site generator written in a language I am familiar with, so that ruled out jekyll, which seems to be the most popular static site generator, but it is written in Ruby.

I looked at a number of other static site generators, and even flirted with the idea of creating my own, but eventually settled on hyde. Some of the other static site generators I tried out are strangecase and pelican.

Hyde is pretty capable, but doesn’t seem to be under active development. Despite that, their templating language is very capable, and I was able to implement my photo gallery with it.

I created a script to aid in creating photo albums, and that will also compress the images for the web and apply a watermark.

Once I had the site generator set up, I realized this was a perfect opportunity to redesign my site. After one redesign, I wasn’t content with how it displayed on mobile devices, so I looked into bootstrap which makes it easy to create responsive sites. Once I updated my layouts to make it bootstrap friendly, I used bootswatch for theming inspirations.

I have made my site layout with the current content available publicly on github, so feel free to fork it and use it for your own site.

I have migrated all of my old blog posts, and have started migrating all of the photos, so you can expect those in the next week or so.

Thanks for reading my blog and checking out my site. If you notice anything wrong or have any recommendations, please let me know.