The task of building this page was quite long. Join me while I give some highlights!
My initial goal for this website was to build it completely from scratch and host it on my own server.
However, with recent cybersecurity bugs such as heartbleed, Dirty COW, and Stack Clash, it became clear that it would not be advisable to host this website myself. I would need to be a cybersecurity expert to prevent as many nasty attacks as possible against my own computer, which I am not and do not have the time to become. I heard from a friend however, that Jekyll allowed static site generation and better yet, Github Pages offered free hosting for jekyll pages. This was my solution.
I started by looking at Jekyll site templates but I did not find any I particularly liked. None seemed to have the level of control nor variety of abilities which I was interested in. I embarked on creating my own Jekyll website by first refreshing my CSS memory with a CSS tutorial at W3Schools. Then I got to work prototyping this site.
Selecting a font was difficult. I installed the What Font google chrome plugin which allows you to easily inspect the fonts present on a web page. This coupled with viewing many alternative fonts in the Google fonts library allowed me to settle on the Lato font. I also settled on the Hack font for fixed-width code needs.
As I intend this to be a scholarly blog complete with citations, I went looking for a citation solution which I found with the brilliant Jekyll Scholar. As good as it is however, my favorite citation scheme IEEE was not correctly implemented. I’ve implemented a temporary solution for this website, and in the future I will submit some PRs to fix up this problem. You can see the issues I’ve opened about this here and here.
I intend to tweak and perhaps drastically change this website for years to come, so check in periodically for new blog posts and updates on my projects. I also anticipate to create a website about my personal life, so stay tuned for that.
Here is a list of resources I found useful: