Background

My old website was written in pure HTML and CSS back in high school, and the content was extremely outdated. Maintaining the website was a hassle and a nightmare, since there was a lack of cohesion in the code – it was very much glued together. I needed to be able to generate content for teaching quickly, and I knew the current solution I had then would not scale. As a result, I started to look for a solution involving something I knew well – Markdown.

Jekyll + Whiteglass

I stumbled upon CS151’s website, which uses this same theme. Seeing that they converted a blog posting engine (Jekyll) into something more of a personal website generator from Markdown, I decided it was time to dive in and explore how it worked.

The setup of Jekyll + Whiteglass is extremely easy. Their instructions are straightforward and cohesive, and setup was quick. Converting the websites to a personal website took only a bit of time once I figured out the right pages to modify, and most of the pages I wrote are written in Markdown. Adding new pages is also extremely quick, and the syntax highlighting is beautiful, making it easy to generate new content.

Deployment

This website is served from a Google Cloud Engine instance with the f1-micro (free) plan, deployed using Dokku as a static website (behind Nginx).

Github