Keeping with my purpose, I want to write a bi-monthly (bi-weekly?)1 summary of what I have accomplished. In the past two weeks, I generated the base mjkranch.com content, transitioned to the Beautiful Hugo theme, generated a CV from Front Matter, migrated to Gitlab, and started CGSC Hacks. Looking back, I did quite a bit. I do feel like I have been stuck in the minutiae of website design and content building (the boring polishing aspects) instead of the more rewarding big system building or problem-solving aspects of web development, but I’ve made some progress and continued to learn.
New Theme (Beautiful Hugo)
Roy told me to start with Beautiful Hugo. Long story short, I picked Clean Startup Bootstrap2 and then wasted a bunch of timing adding features like sub-menus and additional social icons. Beautiful Hugo supports these features and more natively. Ultimately, I am happy with this theme and glad I transitioned, but it was a non-trivial usage of time that I should have avoided from the start.
Building Content
I also spent entirely to long (several hours) generating the initial content in work, play, and teach as well as updating my cv. I did not learn a lot from a technical perspective, but it was helpful documenting what I have done and will be useful for future applications / resume (i.e. it was a necessary and useful evil). I also am still getting over my fear of public writing which made it take longer, but this fear will lessen with more repetition.
Using Front Matter to build my CV
Probably the most technical thing I did was create a Hugo layout to build my cv. Again, this was an entirely too time-intensive process. I first did the entire HTML by hand. I then realized there was a lot of repetitions (loops) and decided to redo the cv using a Hugo layout to build all the html from Front Matter. I intend to do a post on this project later, but it was fun.
CGSC Hacks
Lastly, I started a hacking club (CGSC Hacks) with the purpose of teaching hacking to my peers here at school. I still do not have official approval for the club, but I moved forward anyway. I bought the initial domain, created the base site, and started designing some initial promo posters with puzzles. Again, I spent a lot of time on non-technical things like the design of the logo, website, posters, etc., but I am pleased with the initial product. More to follow on this club in the coming weeks.
Design resources
Mostly for record keeping, I wanted to highlight 3 resources I found to help in the design process.
- Lunapic.com (Online Image Editor)- I do not have adobe so this site was great particularly with adding transparency to images.
- Compressjpeg.com (Online Image Compression) - This site compresses entire folders and was much faster than doing individual compression.
- QR-code-generator.com (QR Code generator) - This site creates custom (colored and with logos) QR codes for free.
- Bi-x means either twice x or once every 2 x. Very Confusing. [return]
- Warning: don’t dive too deep into the maintainer. His personal website re-directs to something rather inappropriate. [return]