Website theme update

2 minute read

What is Jekyll

Jekyll is a blog-aware, static sites generator that was created to simplify the process of creating static website. The reason that I use Jekyll is that it removes the need for a server, a database, or security updates. Just push markdown content to a git repo on Github and github pages using Jekyll. After a few minutes my updated website appears at blog.abluestar.com. Since the pages are static, there is little chance of someone exploiting a flaw in the web server, or in a script to deface my website. I been using Jekyll and Github pages to build my website since 2016.

New Jekyll theme

I needed to relearn Jekyll for an upcoming work project and decided to revamp the theme on my personal website as a learning experience. I just finished the update and this is the first post with the new theme. Clean, simple, with SEO and social sharing baked in. Tell me what you think.

History of funvill.com and abluestar.com

When I started web development back in 2001, one the first things I did was create a blog to share my experience online with others. Started learning with pain html, this was before javascript became a common thing, and CSS was still new. In 2003 I moved on to Movable type and was able to generate my blog using template files. I created dozens of different templates and for awhile all I did was create website themes instead of writing content for my website. I learned a lot during the Movable type years. In 2005 the community had spoken and Wordpress was clear winner in website CMS. I created a few themes and dozens of plug-ins over the years. I have fond memories of my time with Wordpress, but security was abysmal. Between the security holes in Wordpress and all the 3rd part plug-ins I spent a log of time patching and updating instead of writing content. In 2010 I switched my domain name from funvill.com to abluestar.com and I created my own custom CMS. It was a great learning experience. I iterated on it constantly as I learned about new techniques and experimented. I had a lot of fun making my own CMS. When I was using Wordpress the attackers where robots/script kiddies were not attacking me personally just any wordpress site that they could. In 2016 the attacks were personal and directed specifically to me and my website. My custom CMS couldn’t keep up with the attacks and I eventually decided to migrate to Jekyll and static website. From 2016 onwards I been using Jekyll and Github pages. The world has changed a lot in 20 years.