Taking my own name in vain.
12 May 2022
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about messing around with GitHub pages and Jekyll is getting it to work and, more importantly, understanding how it all fits together. That includes these amazing theme I’m running, Basically Basic. There’s been mis-steps, a few choice words and also discovery when I found out I could see the errors that were causing this site to not even load. I had no idea to check actions but when in doubt, click all the buttons!
Eventually I figured out that I’d formatted a couple parts of the config file wrong and needed to comment out another, least for now, to get it all to work. I’m still figuring out why the pages I’ve created don’t appear in the side menu over there but I’ll take the little victories I can get any day. I’m hoping that, eventually, I’ll be a pro at this but if I’m honest with myself I’ll be happy just knowing how to post, make pages and generally make content over anything else.
What I do quite like is being able to do all of this in Visual Studio Code which, with the right plugins, allows you to pull you repoistory, edit your files and then commit them back all within the same application. This may sound pretty trivial to some but it was rather pleasing once I had it all working.
So now that this is, menu aside, all working, the next step is a decision more than anything. My current hosting package does not allow for the installation of Jekyll on the platform. If I wanted to host with my current provider, I’d need to change the package and ultimately pay more per month of the ability to run this. Whilst I’m not totally against this, it’d probably be a wee while before I’d proceed with that. At the same time, however, my site never really had a vast amount of traffic so I could possibly get away with a pointing my domain here and utilise GitHub.
It’s a quandry, that’s for sure, but a good one to have. It also gives me the opportunity to learn Markdown and Jekyll in an environment where I can keep a track of changes and so on. Either way, it’s fun and something new to mess around with that’s not going to cost me a thing and in this economy, that’s no bad thing!