New Look on JayGrossman.com
Welcome to the new version of my blog!!! I migrated over 10+ years of content to a platform and a fresh (cleaner) look.
The Old Blog
In 2012, I was doing a lot more development in ASP.NET/C#, so I decided to move my blog to a platform that was more familiar to me. I set up my blog with blogengine.io that I self-hosted. At the time, it had some decent features and I was able to modify a theme I liked (design shown below):
There were some things I didn't like about my set up:
- It was a pain to set up and maintain.
- It had become slower.
- The WYSIWYG editor made some really ugly HTML.
- The widgets were not flexible and easy to customize.
(compiling old .NET to make changes was a pain). - A white background would be better for reading content.
Moving on to something more modern
I remembered that my friend Collin Meyers had mentioned that he set up a blog hosted with Github Pages. So I took a look and it looked pretty straight forward to set up.
Github Pages natively supports the ruby based blog framework - Jekyll. I had never used it before, but it was very easy to set up locally with rbenv, install the gems and get it working. There were some things I immediately liked:
- There were plenty of themes to choose from (free and paid).
I chose the Mediumish because it was clean and simple. - The scripting is easy to customize the theme.
- There are tons of examples on google and ChatGPT.
- I can use both HTML and markdown.
There are many great tutorials online that will walk you through setting up a blog with Github Pages and Jekyll. I found this one to be the most helpful: Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages.
Here is a nice video I watched by Spencer Pao:
There were some gotchas in setting up a custom domain. Here is a helpful video from Kenny Yip:
Since I migrated from a different platform to Jekyll, it was helpful to set up redirects so my old URLs resolve with my new site. This GEM was helpful to set up page level redirects:
https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from
The new platfrom will certaily make it easier for me to post new content. Now I just need to find time and motivation to add more to this blog consistently.