After years using Wordpress to host an abandoned it was time to make a refresh on my page. Because the plan was to build just a simple about me page, I went with plain static pages.

At first, it looked like an good idea. With the basic layout done, I started building my resume with JSON Resume and a custom template, along with the localized version and the projects page. Soon I realized it was going to be a nightmare to keep everything up to date.

Jekyll and GitHub Pages

My alternative plan was to go with a static site generator, like Pelican, built on Python, or Jekyll, built on Ruby. After some research, Jekyll was the winner for the single fact that it powers GitHub Pages.

Jekyll has lot of features, including Markdown (including GFM using the kramdown engine), Liquid templating language and Sass. As a bonus for hosting on GitHub Pages you get a nice hosting for free and lots of easy ways to edit the content.

Starting out the project was easy, following Jekyll documentation and studying the structure of projects like Jekyll Now and Poole. Jekyll is a bit tricky to install on Windows, but there is a nice tutorial for that.

As a goal for this project I wanted to be able to generate my resume from the same JSON file I used on JSON Resume. Jekyll is able to read JSON data files, so I just needed to rewrite my resume template to use Liquid (with some help from their syntax guide).

Final result

In a week, working on my free time, I feel the result is good enough (if you disagree, please leave your suggestion). I expect to post here more frequently, logging my progress on game development and other random topics.

If you are curious about the source code, explore the repository on GitHub. You are free to copy it (under MIT license), just be original with the appearance.

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