Motivation
I want to build, let’s call it a blog. Something that I can use as notebook, knowledge-base, snippets store, share platform. Other purposes of this blog are: train writing skills and use it as CV.
TODO: create CV page and/or portfolio page
I’m using Evernote for personal notes, but it is quickly becomes messy-and-hard-to-find-something. So I decide that I need something (technique or attitude, rather than soft) to organize knowledge, make it easy to find something.
Workflow
Haven’t decide yet. Will get back to this subject after some time using current setup as is.
Tools
Jekyll
I like ideas of Jekyll: all posts, notes, pages (all sort of documents) stored as markdown files on a disk. I can use my favorite text editor for editing, git for versioning. I like idea of free-form documents, because of front-matter you can attach any additional properties to the document. You can use different layout for each document, which allows to craft unique pages, in contrast to standard blog ware.
Theme
Text is just part of blog. Appropriate visual appearance is required. No one wants to read something that looks like GeoCities. I’m in process of building theme.
Grid
I have had nice experience with Foundation. I want to use its sass modules (grid, visibility, typography). I do not want to use JavaScript, because of its heavy weight.
I searched for Jekyll + Foundation starter kit (1, 2). But decided that I can simply install it through bower and copy required sass files.
Typography
Web typography itself deserves blog post. I want to use vertical rhythm for start.
Elements, Examples
Sometimes I come across beautiful blogs or good UI/UX solutions. I want to collect them in separate page. And reuse them as needed. TODO: create page
Sharing and integration
There is jekyll-seo-tag which should solve this problem. TODO: test how it works. Idea about automatically generating picture for post. Check how ghost solve this problem.
Technical stuff
Loading speed and optimization
I want site to be super-fast. It is simple static site, there are no reasons for it to be slow. I’m thinking about utilizing different techniques to make really fast. I do not know yet what I will choose, but here are examples, to name few:
- https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/
- https://github.com/addyosmani/critical
- gulp and its beautiful collection of plugins. There was post on gulp in my previous version of blog. TODO: restore it.
- minifiers for: JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, SVGs
Tracking
Google analytic easiest choice.
CDN, HTTPS
Cloudflare. TODO: setup account for it
Hosting
As of now I’m using github pages and git for deployment. Other option would be Amazon S3 and script for deployment.