Weirdly enough, my "Hello world" blog post is showing up several months after I began writing. The reason for this is pretty simple: I've been really lame about consistently publishing in any sort of public venue til now. This post also commemorates a new category I hope doesn't get used too often - MetaBlog! Basically I'll tag posts about the blog itself, whether writing, content, or technology, in this category. I find most of that tiresome to read, so I'll try not to inflict too much of my "meta" writing on you.
First thing I want to cover is the blog itself. I decided to use Hexo because it's got all the bells & whistles I've been too lazy to add to my custom generators (that is, it does more than parse markdown and stick files together) and tons of people making themes. I can feel someone thinking to themselves "You're using Github, why not Jekyl?" Two main reasons: 1. I like to fiddle with and customize my writing setup and I don't use Ruby very much; 2. Way too many issues getting it running correctly. I've tried multiple Ruby versions, RVM, etc and some dependency I want always has issues, so I gave up.
Back to the themes! I saw a few Hexo themes I liked, and finally settled on NeXT's Mist subtheme. Active development, nice clean look, a few extra features I like - the downside for me is that the developer is Chinese, meaning lots of the documentation/issues/etc are a bit difficult to use. Machine translations are good enough, though. While there's tons of little tweaks I've made, the biggest & most obvious is probably the color scheme.
Bear with me for a minute.
I spend a lot of time looking at screens. A LOT of time. Programs like Flux and Redshift have been life-savers, but also converting as much as I can to dark themes. Bright backgrounds with dark text are all well and good, but after a few hours of reading off a lightbulb my eyes start to hurt. Dark backgrounds and light text are less strain on my eyes. Why would I make my default blog a color scheme I'd hate to read?
Normally this isn't a problem, and I've got to give tons of credit to iissnan for an awesome theme, but the CSS (er, Stylus) for the theme was a bit of a pain. The biggest and most useful changes for anyone looking at skinning NeXT in my fork is probably that I've consolidated virtually every color choice into the base.styl. It's a hot mess in there right now, but you can basically find everything with a quick grep of the CSS directories and searching in one file now when my names don't quite make sense.
Along those lines, I also raised the base font size (let me know if anything is still hard to read). I don't understand why text-content heavy sites insist on putting tiny letters with low-contrast colors. If you felt the need to zoom in, let me know! (filing an issue works, mention the device and resolution plz) I hate that too.
The only other thing I really need to fix is the memory usage, since the amount this simple blog sucks up seems ridiculous to me.
That's the gist of the blog software, so what about the content? Where have all those previous articles from the past year come from? Why are you just seeing them now? All excellent questions. Mostly, I've been lazy. I write lots of articles in response to specific people, or because it's on my mind, or for use in classes I've taught, but I rarely feel the need to publish. Not that I'm shy, just that I find the process a bit self-aggrandizing. However, I've been bugged for months now about making some articles I've written publicly available, having them searchable, and apparently people want to hear what I have to say, so here it is. You're welcome!
But seriously, I hope what I write is useful or entertaining - if usually off-the-cuff - and welcome any feedback.