This post is going to reveal how inexperienced I am. About six weeks ago, I decided I was going to build a blog with Jekyll and host it with Github pages. I have no idea why. I’m sure I must’ve heard it in a podcast, or article, or tweet. I mean, the name is pretty cool, but I prefer Gatsby over Jekyll if we’re talking names. Anyway, I started by creating the the blog without installing a bundler, and until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have any gem files in the repo. I was going off of a layout in a tutorial, and I had only a vague idea of what markdown is. Go ahead, call me names, shake your head, but don’t stop reading.
It never occurred to me that there were templates. Again, I’m not sure what I was thinking. Once I woke up from this nightmare, I realized 1. My blog needed a major design overhaul 2. I’m definitely not as good at design as I thought I would be 3. It’s not easy to throw this together. I spent way too many hours trying to tweak my css or change up the html.
I also spent too much time looking at templates. There are some nice ones out there. And I was really tempted to try one out. Actually, if I knew it would be easy to do without affecting my existing content, I probably would have. But in some ways, it felt like cheating. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with using a template, but for me, coding is about the learning experience and growing as I create. Although I wouldn’t mind a side hustle building websites from Wordpress, that doesn’t take me closer to my bigger goals. Although some of the creation process was frustrating I learned/am learning a lot about the basics.
The Basics I Learned
- How to use my terminal;
- How to use github, including merging a pull request and resolving an issue;
- How to confidently use Atom;
- Markdown tools;
- Testing layout with different screen sizes;
- How to use dev tools;
- How to make a circle in css;
- How to preview my blog locally.
Are there downsides? Of course. No one’s looking at my blog layout and saying, “we’ve got to hire her.” But I’m not ready for that anyway. If your goal is to create something that will get you hired, I would not recommend doing it this way unless you had a good amount of time set aside. I’m basically limited to when the kids aren’t hungry. Would I have learned some of this stuff if I had used a template? Of course, but I don’t think nearly as fast as I had to when I was trying to work on layout. Are there still a ton of things I don’t know how to do (like get disqus to work or add an image from my computer)? For sure. Do I wish my blog looked as good as those templates? Hell yea, but it’s a good reminder of where I am. I want the blog to progress with me as I learn to code.