New Hobby Growing Pains
28 Jul 2025
Out of the many hobbies I’ve kept, blogging was one I explicitly didn’t think I’d be undertaking. It didn’t seem like it was worth the time or effort. I’d rather be programming. I’d rather be drawing. I’d rather be making music. I’d rather be building this website.
But here we are! Simply led along the path to learning how to bloat my website with Jekyll to the point that I start tearing my hair out. It feels like a total mess so far, the way files are just littered everywhere in the root directory. But it’s my first website, so if I care enough for it, I’m sure I’ll get around to cleaning things up eventually. It’d just a matter of time. Or not. We’ll see.
So how has it been so far, putting up this little shack in my corner of the digital ocean? It’s certainly taken up the majority of yesterday’s time. The formal opening of the website was surprisingly straightforward, all I really had to do was throw $20 at Porkbun and I had a working website immediatley. Beyond that I just needed to replace the HTML that was already on their server, add some CSS and images, and I had my homepage! My homepage.
No, most of the timesink was Jekyll. Because it isn’t enough to make a homepage and a few links to other spots on your tiny website - Repeating headers and content across pages, let alone having to update them every time you want to change something, quickly gets tedious and out of control. You need static site building (read: templating) software to keep everything manageable. I chose Jekyll after browsing a giant list of site generators and deciding that I’d be better off with the one the tutorials kept mentioning. After the inevitable hiccup of realizing that meant installing Ruby and having to figure out how that worked, I was good to go.
Or so I thought.
The tutorials documented on Jekyll’s site are verbose enough to get by, don’t get me wrong. But since my eyes were already glazing over after building a site and installing Ruby, I neglected to notice that Jekyll doesn’t work on your website’s files unless you add YAML frontmatter to the top of your file. Three dashes, just three dashes, and I would’ve saved an actual hour of fumbling around and googling why my site generator wasn’t generating generated content. And that’s not considering the time I’m spending trying to get a grasp on Liquid - I’ll just have to remind myself to look at a cheatsheet I found later.
Since getting over that hump it’s been getting easier, though. My directories are a mess and the way everything is connected seems needlessly complicated to me, but I’m just not used to this kind of development yet. I’ll get accustomed to it and be swimming happily in no time, I’m sure. Still, there’s the odd hitch here and there. The last of them that I’m expecting is learning that copying the default config from Jekyll’s site stops blog posts from rendering. The fault lies with the collections_dir option - explicitly setting it and throwing my posts directory in there got things working again.
In any case, it’s all coming together. I’ll probably draw something after I get through the rest of the tutorial docs - Then I’ll get to struggle with figuring out how to populate the art page!
~ sophont ~