ok bear with me.
the basic techy stuff
This is a static site generated with Jekyll. All my code and content sits comfy in a Github repository. I developed this site on Windows 10 using Ubuntu… unsurprisingly, the documentation for this was difficult to navigate and troubleshoot until I stumbled upon Virtual Goods Dealer. Note that this documentation is a little outdated. Be sure to reference the latest versions of packages mentioned. I use Netlify to deploy my site and host it on my custom domain. A word of advice (since no tutorial cautioned me about this); if you’re using a custom domain, deploy with netlify, not gh pages. I don’t know the theory, but it just didn’t work for me. Anyways…
the look
I used this digital garden jekyll template by Maxime Vaillancourt.
I actually didn’t change much. Minor edits for fonts and colors were added to the sass.cs files. Colors and other supplementary things I’m playing with are going to get compiled in the playground.
honorable mentions
- I love the jekyll bonsai template by manunamz, and originally tried using it for my own site. I ultimately decided against it (clearly) because I’m unsure if my garden is going to need so much metadata.
- I also am a big fan of tom critchlow’s wiki which runs on the code in this repo
- definitely take the time to explore maggie appleton’s github repo on digital gardening
disclaimer
I have no web dev coding experience at all… unless you count tumblr html. However, I am a novice in bioinformatics so I started this endeavor with basic understanding of git, bash, and directory management. If you follow the Virtual Goods Dealer static website tutorial from the beginning, I believe you will have all the basic understanding necessary to get your garden going. Otherwise, I am also here to help!
i’m learning!
This was sort of an endeavor I jumped into alone. I don’t have anyone on call that’s always going to answer my questions and help me debug. I spend a lot of time sifting through stackoverflow, but when I want to expedite the process, chatgpt has been an insanely good resource.
With that said, this is both a functioning site and a learning activity for me… who knows if the it will ever have a final form. To keep up with my brain, you can always check out pieces that I’m working on building in my to do list.