Hi! This is Jack. Just writing a short update on the site itself and what’s going on behind the scenes =]
I have been working hard at getting this website viewable to the public and was originally planning on using Github pages with Jekyll. Jekyll is awesome and has a lot of uses for building static sites and blogs just like this. Unfortunately, properly installing a ruby development environment was not a trivial task! I tried many guides but alas there was no success. (Jekyll’s guide, Mike Dane’s guide on Youtube, a few others that fleet my memory as of right now)
There are lots of ways of installing and managing your installs of Ruby and each one I tried came with its own set of difficulties. (Rbenv, base install) and there are a lot of tools and ‘gems’ that ruby uses for jekyll and github pages. Between bundler, rbenv, and my setup (Windows subsystem for linux running Ubuntu 20.04) I decided that I should re-evaluate my options.
In the past I have researched static site generators for a short stint at a company called Novice Games (Summer 2019) with my high school classmates of Jack Roche and Nate Romanelli. The two most popular ones that I found were Jeykll and Hugo. When I came to revaluate this site’s future in development, Hugo became what is now my main focus to get this published.
I intend on publishing this site using Hugo (written in the go programming language) and have CI taken care of through Github actions (if possible)
I do not know much CI at the moment but the CI setup on the UMass-Makerspace’s blog was something that I saw real power in and will attempt to apply it to many problems in the future.
Anywho, the makerspace wrapped up activities for the semester and we ended on a good note as a team. I am looking forward to the summer, getting to spend a little time with my girlfriend, working at AirCycler© (which I will be doing remotely, woohoo!), doing some manual labor in Berlin, NY for my family (Dyken Pond & Center Berlin), and taking care of stuff at home in Duxbury.
Hope this was a good read if you were curious! Talk soon, Jack