~ajroach42.com

I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog.

Dr. Jekyll

Posted: February 27, 2016

This blog is a new thing for me (as you can see from the low post count) that I’m building and maintaining as a learning exercise, and a way to keep my skillset sharp. The site is built with Jekyll and hosted through Github pages. For those unfamiliar with either of these things, that means:

  • The site is static (and should be pretty damn fast.)
  • The posts are written in markdown
    • which gives me an opportunity to really familiarize myself with markdown in a way that I have been unable to previously.
  • The heavy lifting for the site is done through Github pages.
    • This means that I get to re-familiarize myself with GIT, and to work with Github.
    • That’s great experience for me, and a good way to keep my skill set sharp when I’m not actively working on any open source projects.
  • The site is based on templates (like wordpress or another CMS) but loads without all the overhead of a dynamically generated site.
    • That means that, over time, I’ll be able to do some pretty nifty things as I explore the template system and conform it to my needs.
  • Writing regularly lets me keep up with my ongoing projects, and have a single place to direct people when they want more information.

So, that’s the gist of my goals with running this blog. It’s a place for me to keep track of the things I’m building and the thoughts that led me to build those things, and to maintain certain facets of my skillset.

So far, it’s been pretty successful. I’m impressed by the flexibility of Jekyll, and only slightly disapointed by the limitations of tools such as Prose.io in assisting to manage the site (spell check would be nice, and the automatic image upload is broken.)

I’m looking forward to seeing what I can acomplish on this platform.

The image above is from the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which you can watch below:

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