Welcome to my new blog! (Powered by Jekyll)
So… I saw on Twitter that Wordpress is planning to sell users’ data to train AI. Even though I’m not the best writer in the world, or even a little bit famous, I don’t want AI to read my 12 year old blogposts. Therefore, I ventured to find new blogging platforms… and found Jekyll.
Last year, I watched Mu-An Chiou’s talk in the International Design in Government online conference. When I googled her name, I stumbled into her blog and got me excited. Her home page is like a one-sided social media where visitors can read her posts, view the pictures she took, and even stories! Not Instagram stories, but she kinda made her own stories! There’s no comment section, and that’s a plus. I’ve been wanting to reduce my social media usage and Mu-An’s blog became my north star.
There’s just one problem: I can’t code. I understand a bit of HTML and CSS… but when I say a bit it means VERY LITTLE. It’s rusty since I last learned it in high school. Thankfully, there are tons of themes that can be forked and be readily used! However, I never stop at default template. I’m a DIY girl, and that’s what I did.
Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages is seamless enough. I use the Minima template that is as basic as white rice on Indonesian dining tables. Since it’s basic, many people are using it and I can see their codes on their GitHub to see how they customise the theme.
The two blogs that I learned from are Shobhit Bakliwal and Harsh Browns. Both use the Minima theme, host their websites in GitHub, made them their own, yet still keep the them simple. When it’s time to tweak things, I observe their code and ask for ChatGPT’s guidance.
Do you notice how I don’t have comment section but have “Reply by mail”? That one I copied from The Jolly Teapot because I thought it’s a brilliant idea. I don’t have to use other third-parties service and just let people email me if they want to share their thoughts. 😊
So what you see now, if you’re reading it on my website, is the result. I choose muted yellow as the background colour to make it easy on the eyes, even though I might later change it to grey.
I also intend to make Deeper Conversations my personal brand. It’s been my blog username since Tumblr days and since I have become a UX Researcher, who conducts interviews (a.k.a. somehow deep conversations on selected topics lol) for a living, I think Deeper Conversations still work.
What’s on my backlog for this blog? (it rhymes…)
- Fix cv formatting
- Figure out how to do tagging
- Create and upload favicon
- Migrate old blogposts
- Blog more!