New website and blog
Moving the website to a new platform
I spent several evenings rebuilding my website and blog, www.glow3d.com.
How I got here
I started writing about my hobby game engine on blogger.com several years ago. Later I moved to my own website on AWS running WordPress. The main reason was to learn the basics of HTML and web development, and I also wanted to try the server as a host for my multiplayer game prototypes. The WordPress blog was bad. Its SQL database crashed every so often and I never found out why, probably something in the memory configuration. In the end I got tired of it, cancelled my AWS subscription (to be honest, mostly because the free period had run out) and closed the website and the blog.
Jekyll
For the rebuild I picked Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, one of GitHub’s co-founders. It’s called static because the sites it produces have no SQL database or complex server scripts. It’s fast and simple, and it’s built around blogging. It supports Markdown out of the box, with syntax highlighting for almost every programming language. You compile your Markdown posts and templates into a finished static site, and GitHub will host that site for free. This was exactly what I needed.
Jekyll has been around since 2008, so templates are easy to find. I liked the designs by html5up, which are under a Creative Commons license. I started from Jekyll Now, a simple Jekyll blog template, and a day later applied the html5up theme on top of it. Porting my old blog was a bit painful. I had exported it from WordPress to Markdown, and some scripts did most of the cleanup. This guide is useful if you’re moving a WordPress blog to Jekyll.
I used Disqus for comments at first, but after reading this article I replaced it with Facebook comments. In short, Disqus added 105 extra network requests and a ton of tracking for some shady sites. You can find the source code for the website and blog on my GitHub account.
I hope no exciting new technology comes along soon, so I don’t have to port this site again.
P.S. The broken English of the old blog was fixed by my 9-year-old son, who won his school’s spelling bee. He is now my full-time editor.