Since my little home on the web at MIT was taken down once I graduated (pretty annoying, I wish we received free web hosting for life over there!), it was time to create a new website. I went all out and purchased my own domain and then poked around to select a website platform that would also support blogging. I decided to use Jekyll Bootstrap for several reasons. First, it integrated with Github and allowed me to use Github’s free web hosting (amazing!). How cool is it to clone a repository, push it to Github, and have a working website 10 minutes later?! Second, it had some simple themes I could use and avoid mucking around much with CSS (though I did end up learning some CSS (finally!) via CodeAcademy to help with basic layout changes). And I was told that Jekyll has several advantages over Wordpress, especially for programmers: you can manage your website from the command line, use Markdown for blog posts, and trade PHP for Ruby (win!). Plus, all content is static, making things nice and speedy.

So far I’m very pleased with how easy (and fun) it has been to set things up. The most confusing part was figuring out how to serve my github pages from my own domain.