Hi, everyone! So I finally did it. I created a blog. I’ve never really aspired to become a blogger, but recently I’ve been considering it more and more. I finally decided to commit to it, give it a try, and see how it goes. Hopefully it works out well.
In case you don’t know me, I’m a software developer that does web development for a living. I’m also very interested in game development, which I’ve been messing around with in my free time for quite a while now. In fact, more than anything else, it’s the game dev stuff that really got me to consider starting this blog. I think I’ve built up my game dev skills to the point where I’m ready to try to create a finished game to sell. And since I’m aspiring to do that, I figured it would be a good idea to establish more of an online presence and hopefully get a bit of a following as I develop my game. So a lot of the stuff I post on here will probably be related to game development, but there might be other stuff as well. In short, here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish with my blog at this point:
- Share information and updates about projects I’m working on (games or other).
- Create tutorials to share knowledge and skills I’ve learned.
- Get better at writing (and communication in general).
How This Site Was Built
I had some fun creating this site, and I learned some new stuff in the process. Here’s what I did to create it:
- Framework: I used a static site generator called Jekyll to create this site. It’s pretty cool, because once you use it to create the templates for all your different types of pages, you can add new content just by creating Markdown files. I’m a big fan of using plain text whenever possible, so I love using Markdown whenever I have to generate formatted text.
- Hosting: This site is being hosted with GitHub Pages, which has a couple of nice benefits. The first big one is that it’s free. It also integrates with Jekyll, so all I have to do to update my site is make a commit to the master branch of my Git repository, and the new version of my site is generated for me. Pretty convenient!
- Style: I used Bootstrap as a starting point for all my CSS. I have a lot of experience with it, and I like to use it for responsive design stuff. I’m using the Sass version of it and building my styles on top of it. For coming up with my color scheme, I used a really cool site called Coolors. As far as design inspiration, there were a couple different sites that I took a bit of inspiration from. I really like the look and feel of Chocolatey’s web site, and I ended up doing a similar style for my site. When I was looking for examples of how existing blogs were laid out, I liked how the blog by Crew was done, and I ended up making a somewhat similar layout to theirs (although they’ve updated it since then).
