What am I looking at

October 27, 2021

I am glad you asked. It is nothing revolutionary. Perhaps even outdated and old looking. But let me help you understand what this website is built on, if you have not already figured out.

In short it is a static website hosted on Github pages. It is a nice free way to host small websites and offer some out-of-the-box features that I like.

I have a few websites, one of them is jespereiche.com which is a self-hosted Wordpress site. That is fine a well and works okay for my use so far. But being a developer that wanted to try and learn something new, I had for some time looked at static site generators and wanted to give one a try.

I found a guide that explain how to easily get a static webpage hosted on Github using the Jekyll generator. I followed the steps and it worked right out of the box. Once I pushed my changes to the server, the site was built and deployed to my personal github.io page.

Looking through a thread on Hacker News I stumbled on a design from a static site generator that I really, really liked.

It was this athena generator based on “Tufte design” which had a nice minimal design that was exactly what I was after (see demo here: athena).

I actually gave it a try, first on Ubuntu and later on my Macbook Pro, but some of the pandoc-dependencies seems to have been left in a broken or unmaintained state, so I had to abandon. This was a real defeat as I loved the minimal design.

Hence a new thought sprang into my mind.

Would it not be possible to find a Jekyll-based theme that looked like the athena one?

Low and behold - there was a Tufte-inspired Jekyll theme! Unfortunately it was not quite as the athena one: Jekyll Tufte theme

But it had the right ingredients and ended up being the basis for what you are looking at now. I cloned the Jekyll Tufte theme and got to work on making it look like the athena one. At least to the parts of it that I really liked.

I will probably keep perfecting it in the future, but for now it got me close enough to the vision I had when I started out, so I am really pleased with it.

And I must admit that this entire flow around checking in changes to publish new content and changes on the website is really smooth for a seasoned developer like myself. Then the question is only how much I will actually use this place I have created for myself and how many posts I will be writing.

The path has been layed. Now I just have to walk it.