Version 2.0

If you’re new here, welcome! Have a look around.

For both of you who’ve visited in the last year and a half, the site looks massively different than it did before.

In January 2025, I decided I wanted my own little corner of the Internet again, and set it up on a service called Bear. Bear is an awesome place to get a site, particularly a blog, off the ground. Herman has built a fantastic platform, and it made a great launchpad to get my blogging life started again.

While fleshing out my Bear site, and personalizing it to be my own, I did occasionally run into some of Bear’s guardrails that make it a great system in general, but a little constrictive for what I wanted the site to be. Meanwhile, I had started hunting for ways to set up another web project I was considering. The more I learned about static site generators in general, and Jekyll in particular, the more the gears started turning. Two main thoughts bubbled to the top:

• What’s changed in basic web page development (HTML and CSS) since I first started (and subsequently fell away from) making web pages when I was in college?
• Can I learn some of that and bake it into a new version of this site, that’s less “Bear” and more “me”?

The answers turned out to be “a lot, and it’s impressively powerful” and “you’re here reading this, so evidently yes”. In particular, CSS Grid (which wasn’t a thing yet when I was first learning to write HTML) made building a clean page layout rather simple. In fact, this entire site layout (excluding content images in some posts) is in CSS and HTML. I didn’t explicitly set out to avoid using images in the layout, but I was able to do so, which helps keep the site lightweight.

Over the last four to five months, where I could squeeze it in between other priorities, I drew up what I wanted the site to look like, and started assembling the site using Jekyll to render. After a lot of building and tweaking and refreshing and retrying, it’s finally ready to deploy.

Two other factors came in to play while putting this new site together. First, while I don’t have any moral objections to using AI to help build projects, I did want to look at this as a challenge to myself to write it myself. I did take the opportunity to engage both Claude and Grok during the development process, but only as a training knowledge aid — in essence, “don’t do it for me; show me how to do it/what I’m doing wrong, so I can fix it myself”.

Second, I opted to try to do something for the first time in my history of setting up blog sites: content migration. Every other blog I’ve set up over the years has been a clean start, with no prior content brought along. This time, in part because I’m reusing the same domain and site name, and since it’s only been 18 months since the prior site opened, I wanted to keep the hundred or so posts I’d made and carry them forward. That both Bear and Jekyll employ Markdown reduced the number of hiccups in that migration.

So, here we are. Same blog, with some new custom polish, to make the site look and feel exactly how I want it. I’ll continue to share links and interesting things I’ve found, but with the new digs, I’d also like to try encouraging myself to write a little more. No idea what about yet, but that’ll come together in time. While on some prior blogs I’d attempted to do some daily or weekly writing projects, I’m going to try to write a longer article at least once a month here. (Yes, I suppose this technically counts as a July article, but to keep in the spirit of monthly, as well as to not fall out of the habit over the first two months, I’ll aim to come up with something else by the end of the month.)

Your comments and questions are welcome, as usual. I know I don’t have many humans following me here (yet), but for those who’ve read this far, I hope you’ll join me on the journey.