Making This Site

Domain

I had a friend who enjoyed Porkbun based in PNW, so I was interested in trying their domain service out. Finding a domain name: annielu.dev was easy enough. I followed Github Page’s custom domain documentation with the CName file & DNS Provider configurations. Luckily, Porkbun offers Github Pages support, so I didn’t have to manually enter in the records and it could generate the records for me.

SSL Cert

Porkbun also offers free SSL Certificates with Let’s Encrypt. Github Pages is able to detect this and lets me enforce HTTPS in settings. If Porkbun had not offered SSL Certificates, I would’ve used certbot to get a certificate and need to manually set-up and/or update each time the certificate expires.

Static Website

Setting up a static website sounded simple enough. Unfortunately, Jekyll is written in Ruby and I own a macbook – a terrible curse indeed. While trying to install Ruby on my mac, I ran into tons of configuration errors. I searched the forums for answers, looking for the fix, but I wasn’t able to escape dependency hellscape. In the end, I decided to run a Docker Image of Ruby, following this Github Guide and this Docker wiki I found. I setup gems that were the same version as Github Pages, but if I were to try this again, I’d use the official Github Pages Ruby gem that I later found.

After properly installing Ruby, Jekyll, and other stuff, I used the remote theme: No-Style-Please for it’s fast performance and minimalist appeal. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to be able to customize the theme in the future, so I installed it with guidance from Jekyll’s theme documentation. The rest was adding content & tweaking the menu.yml and _config.yml files.