Redesign

Well, I finally bit the bullet and redesigned the site. I’m still using Jekyll for the static site generation, which I love. But I decided it was worth a little bit of money to invest in a quality theme for the site. So I headed over to Jekyll Themes and found one that I think looks very good, and is super configurable. I got some good technical support from the theme developers as well, which I really appreciate.

I ran into a couple snags. One of them is thanks to AWS and its lack of wanting to serve up pages from jekyll the way I needed it to in order to avoid having .html on the end of all my urls. This deploy script proved to be invaluable. I also had to create new IAM credentials on AWS since I didn’t have the originals saved anywhere. The deployment script uses those to talk to S3. The script strips off the .html extensions as well as sets the Content-Type header for each of the blog files.

Next up: bringing over more of my photos to use in the sidebar as well as in the posts themselves.