Blog Moved To Github

Take a look around. Everything’s changed. Yet again. I am sure you’re probably sick of me changing the total appearance of this blog every 3 months or so, and you’re right in being so. Let’s go back into a little history. Around a year from now, I stumbled across Ghost blogging platform. It was clean, neat and beautiful. I knew I always wanted something like that to write. I didn’t have this (nagekar.com) domain at that time. I went ahead and started their trial, which gave me a subdomain at ghost.io to blog on. It was beautiful, visually and the overall experience. After having dealth with most of the popular opensource PHP content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, this was something new altogether.

I registered this domain, about a week later and started using their minimal plan of $5 per month, which included 10k pageviews. It took me not long to realize that I couldn’t afford those $5 because, 1) it was a personal blog from which I wasn’t making any revenue, and 2) because being a student, I have to save money to utilize in other areas like books and all. I got off there, with the half dozen articles I published while I was there for a month and a half. I, with those articles in my backpack started wondering like a hunter, looking for a new shelter, cheap and simple. Svbtle was another platform that I liked, unfortunately I didn’t have an invite at that time, and even when I got the invite, the custom domain feature, which I needed, was only available to paid customers. Of course not everything can be free, and I have no complaints, rather I am grateful to them for such a wonderful platform. I had to settle for Blogger, as the forced ads in WordPress were something that made me hate WordPress.com. Initially, with a custom theme, a little complicated, but later reverted to simple one. Then I went to code my own, which turned out to be successful, as far as my goal was concerned. It was perfect. No foreign code and nothing that increased the load time.

There is a problem with near perfect things. They are boring. And so, I thought, was my blog. No new problems to troubleshoot and no commandline to work with. Blogger is everything what a writer sometimes needs, but we computer people are a different breed. We need problems, then be it in our own personal blogs. While randomly surfing, I came across Jekyll, a blog-like platform created to be used with Github, to publish static pages. I knew not much about how Ruby applications are, or how to set one, but thanks to their excellent documentation, I was able to set it up in less than a day. There is no database, simple text files which become posts and pages. Github automatically parses markup or markdown in the post, and you have a nice little blog which is free, easy to manage and test locally, everyone can see the source, plus new stuff can be published with a mere git push.

I liked the way the blog looks and feels. It is important for me to like it since I mostly blog for selfish reasons, haha, but I hope it is comfortable for others to navigate too. I would like to hear anything regarding the new look of my blog down in the comments, and constructive suggestions are welcome. Keep visiting.