I’m currently travelling South America (in Colombia to be more specific) and found some time to give my website a refresh.

Before:

The first version was something I hacked together really quickly. A custom single page app.

• The entire site was one HTML file.
• Pages were implemented as Markdown files converted to HTML files using a grunt task.
• When menu buttons were clicked, an AJAX call would fetch the pre-built HTML and inject it into the page.

Pros:

• Super easy to add new pages.
• Worked with Markdown files.
• Header could be downloaded and content injected after (progressive rendering).
• No page refreshes (single page “app”).

Cons:

• URL did not change based on the page (no way to link to other pages).
• HTML generated from Markdown was bloated.
• No way to selectively load CSS/JS based on the page.

After:

Since I’m using Github Pages, Jekyll seemed like a better option for building a site.

Changes:

• Nicer theme (thanks Jekyll defaults!)
• Background of all pages is the source code for that page #IM-SO-META-EVEN-THIS-ACRONYM.
  (check out show-code to see how that works)
• Updated content (things have changed since I last built my site…)
• No more AJAX requests on page load.
• Better control over what CSS/JS is included with each page.
• A blog!

I’m still figuring out all the features of Jekyll, but so far it’s been working reasonably well.

If you find any bugs/issues, don’t hesitate to email me.