The Making of my docs

My Docs Site: The Making Of

Credit

Before I start, I want to give credit where it’s due:

• Partial inspiration for this project: NetworkChuck’s vid on his blog
• Theme and good instructions: Techno Tim’s vid
• Python Code for images: NetworkChuck’s blog

Inspiration

I have wanted to start a blog for a while now, but it’s kind of taken a backseat in my mind. It came back up when I bought a domain name. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I had a blog?” Then later I learned about Github Pages, free hosting, and I also thought, “What can I do with this?” Then I watched a little bit of the aforementioned video from NetworkChuck and then I started research.

Research

Soon after discovering Github Pages, I found jekyll, a really simple static site generator. I found the Chirpy theme soon after by watching Techno Tim’s vid on Jekyll, and I kind of liked it. So, I decided to use those.

Making

I tried to follow Techno Tim’s video on my Macbook Pro, but soon failed. Ruby and bundle kept on giving me errors that I had no idea how to deal with, so I almost gave up. However, I remembered that I had a laptop with linux on it (my fav operation sys btw), so I tried on that. Somehow it worked, and I was able to get a start on the project. Somehow many things stopped working, so I stopped.

During this period, the site took a backseat as I worked on my server and my Jellyfin music library.

A few week ago I pretty much finished up on the music server and decieded to come back to this project. After trying out Hugo with NetworkChuck’s video, where I had a brief period of success, I gave up on it. Hugo was just less documented, and, for me, harder to work with. I came back to Jekyll and tried again. I got the config and favicon to work (one of my pain points) and finally got the posts to work. After a struggle with Cloudflare and Github Pages, I got a custom domain working. This part was quite a bit of a struggle with many DNS failures, and confusion too.

Sorry if this was a bit of a bad write up, I don’t remember many of the details since this is obviously after the making of. I will write as I go along next time.

Pictures: