As I mentioned in an earlier post (exactly a year ago! :D) I have my own website now. When I first bought the domain name and hosting package I opted to get a shared hosting server where I could build my own website using Wordpress. However, it never really satisfied me. I got a decent looking website up and running, but I had to work with the constraints of the Wordpress CMS. Whenever I wanted a part of my website to look a particular way, I had to go deep into menus and settings pages to try and tweak it to my liking. Also, most of the themes that were available didn't meet all of my requirements. Some of them would almost meet them but would be missing one critical feature or the other. In the end, I had to compromise by picking a theme that was good enough. I let my website be for about a year as I didn't have time in the middle of the semester to tweak everything to my liking.
In May I finally finished my bachelor's degree. That left me with more time on my hands to tweak my website to my liking. I tried to keep the wordpress blog but I found working with Wordpress themes quite difficult if I wanted to modify them. In the end, I decided to go for something simple that worked: Bootstrap. It was a barebones solution that produced good results using simple HTML classes. I found myself a good theme from Startbootstrap and got started redesigning my website.
Since I was using a static site generator, I no longer needed a hosting service which allowed disk access. So I decided that Github Pages would be the new home of my website. I canceled the hosting service but kept my domain name and pointed it to my brand new github pages site.
I also discovered that it was possible to use Jekyll to produce static blogs that did not require databases. They also had support for importing blogger posts. Jekyll has a lot of cool in built markdown formatting features that Blogger lacks. So I decided to give it a shot. Although I got most of my important posts imported and running on a new Jekyll blog, I was a bit reluctant to leave the platform that I'd been using for so many years. In the end I decided to maintain both blogs separately. The new Jekyll blog will mirror this blog for the most part. However, the Jekyll blog will be curated a little bit more strictly to contain only "professional" posts. This blog will continue to be my outlet for both professional/technical and fun random posts.
Go to ashwinnarayan.com to check out the new website.
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| New Blog |
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| New Website |
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