During February, I worked through a tutorial on how to set up a static website using Jekyll through GitHub. This tutorial was on the Programming Historian website, written by Amanda Visconti. This tutorial led me through how to use GitHub to manage and create files that made up the static site I was creating. It also had me working in my computer’s terminal a lot.
The process itself was not as difficult as I had anticipated. The static website was simply a collection of files on my computer that I could host locally to view and then publish via GitHub. It certainly was more difficult and nerve-wracking than edited a WordPress site. The commands I was entering into the terminal were gibberish to me so I did not feel confident in my ability to debug something if it went wrong. However, having the html files on my computer and being able to make changes to any of it was a very rewarding facet. It was almost like less could go wrong because it was much simpler and I had more control.
I want to learn more about GitHub and static sites and I’m thinking of moving my portfolio to the site I created. I’ve been having trouble publishing it, so I have some debugging to do which is harder than WordPress debugging because things are less intuitive.
This training paired well with my current English professor (ENG-240) and his stories of coding websites at the very beginning of the internet. Most academics knew HTML and had their own static sites which allowed for more democratic and accessible ways to publish information online.