Creating my web
###############
:date: 2013-08-22 14:14:22
:tags: starters, javascript, ruby, github, git

Finally, I've decided to set up a decent personal page. I have settled
for github-pages because I like the idea of keeping my site in a
repository and having someone else host and deploy it for me. The site
will be really simple, mostly static files. Thanks to Github,
`Jekyll <http://jekyllrb.com>`__ will automatically generate static
pages for my posts every time I commit anything new to this repository.

But Jekyll can be used independently, so if I ever choose to host the
site myself, I can do it quite easily. Another thing that I liked about
this approach is that the generated html files can be used in the
future, and I will not need Jekyll to serve it. Jekyll is really simple
and most of the things are written in plain html. That means that
everything could be easily reused if I ever choose to change to another
blogging framework (e.g. pelical). But, for the time being, I like the
fact that Github takes care of the compilation as well, so I can simply
modify or add files through the web interface should I need to.

I hadn't played with HTML and CSS for a while now, so I also wanted to
use this site as a playground. At some point, I realised I was doing
mostly everything in plain HTML and CSS, and decided to keep it like
that for as long as possible. As of this writing, I haven't included any
Javascript code in the page. Probably I will use some to add my
`gists <http://gist.github.com/balkian>`__ and
`repositories <http://github.com/balkian>`__, but we will see about
that.

I think the code speaks for itself, so you can check out `my repository
on Github <http://github.com/balkian/balkian.github.com>`__. You can
clone and deploy it easily like this:

.. code-block:: bash

    git clone
    https://github.com/balkian/balkian.github.com cd balkian.github.com
    jekyll serve -w

I will keep updating this post with information about:

* Some Jekyll plugins that might be useful
* What CSS tricks I learnt
* The webfonts I used
* The badge on the left side of the page
