Credits

What the hell is a credits page? Is this a thing? Should all websites have one? Why have I never heard of this before? WTF!

A credits page was my idea to acknowledge that I didn't build this website from scratch. Let me go back in time... I've coded webpages before. From scratch, writing the HTML and CSS... It was a long time ago, and when I came to the decision last year that I didn't feel like continuing to pay a hosting company for an unviewed and unmaintained Wordpress site, I had the idea that it would be cool to refresh my decrepit skills and turn my relatively static site into a truly static site.

After doing some research, I realized that hardly anyone writes websites from scratch anymore. They use frameworks. They assemble websites from well-engineered pieces of modular code. They use javascript libraries and APIs. So I figured, I should learn that, instead of reinventing the wheel and writing my own dropdown menus and such. Part of me fought against this, because I've always believed in mastering the fundamentals as the best way to learn new skills. When I read a programming book, I start at the beginning. And, you know, I'm just sick of doing that. I already know the fundamentals (I have a computer engineering degree). I have other stuff to do with my time, so I figured I would step out of my comfort zone and try to do things the way the cool kids did them. So I started looking at frameworks, and after some time I decided, in the interests of honesty, to disclose what tools I used to build this site, in the form of a "shout outs" or "credits" page.

Bootstrap is a modular framework of HTML, CSS and Javascript elements that let's you get a "modern" website up and running quickly. It allows for you to design a page that will automatically adjust to different browsing devices (it will look different on a mobile phone than on a laptop. It manages the column widths and divisions automatically so that, as they claim, "front-end web development [is] faster and easier." I decided to give it a try because I didn't feel like designing my own dropdown menus, and when I discovered all the other stuff it could do I was quite happy.

Jekyll is a series of small prgorams written in Ruby that work together to let you host a static "blog". Most traditional blog programs like Wordpress need a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP). This means that "wordpress" is a series of PHP modules that are interpreted by the webserver software (Apache, usually); these modules build the page on request from canned elements and content saved in a database. If you don't want to use a traditional webhost (and pay for it) you can't use wordpress. Jekyll is a way around that. I chose Jekyll because it promised easy migration from wordpress. It was not easy, pretty much every link and picture was broken after the migration. It was a low priority so it took me months of occasionally putzing with it to get it straightened out, but now that it is, I'm happy with it. Adding new content is pretty much as easy as it was with wordpress (not that I plan on adding any content, I just didn't want to throw my old site and everything I wrote away).

GitHub Pages is a hosting platform that lets you publish static websites for free. It's build on top of GitHub, which lets me or anyone store and share files on the internet, is free and rock solid.