My New Post

Finally got this darn thing looking and working reasonably well. I'll probably tweak it more later.

In the meantime, here is a blog! I've spent time over the last three days:

• installing Fedora Kinoite
• researching static site blogging
• getting a dev environment set up
• styling the blog to my liking

And it's been fun! I quite enjoy tinkering with things like this, and haven't really done it in a long time. I haven't installed an IDE yet, so I've been hacking away in Konsole and getting used to the nano text editor. Feels very cool B-) and I am thankful for the syntax highlighting! I may fall back on VSCode in future, but this is doing well for me for now.

My current Konsole setup uses a split view, so I have a tall editor on the left for the main file I'm currently looking at, a small terminal on the topright running the 11ty server, and another small terminal in the bottomright for looking at directory contents or secondary files like CSS.

Looking at static site generators (SSGs) for blogging, Jekyll seemed to be the obvious choice, offered by GitHub Pages (where this will be/is hosted). I wondered if there were any alternatives, especially as I would have to install Ruby and more just to run Jekyll when I don't work with that at all. The Awesome Static Generators page had a lot of options, but 11ty seemed to be the ideal option for me, so I set off trying it out. After a couple of hours of not getting very far, I found a tutorial on their website, "6 Minutes to Build a Blog from Scratch with Eleventy", which accelerated my understanding by lightyears compared to the getting started guide on their site, so now here we are!

As for installing Kinoite: I've had this laptop for 5 years, and before that it was a store demo laptop, so it's quite experienced. It's never had great performance, but has been sufficient for my purposes, although I haven't used it too much in the last couple of years. But lately, trying to use it has been really difficult; Windows 11 feels like treacle sometimes. I knew that the hardware wasn't that bad, and I'd already been considering shifting to Linux, and my main gaming desktop still has Windows if I really need it for anything. So after a lot of time trying to find any old files I might still want, whisking away any old projects to the cloud, I installed Fedora, wiping the drive.

It feels like a whole new PC! I'm really liking the Plasma desktop, and as I've already said I've mostly been in the console anyway. Got Spotify from Flathub so I can jam along to my tunes.

Phew, that ought to do for one blog post. I intend for these not to be too long, but I wasn't able to write any posts until now! Or I suppose I could have done, but I was too busy concentrating on the site itself!

Oh, I did all this to have a nice set up for doing this year's Advent of Code! I was already late when I remembered about it on Tuesday, the 8th; now I have to get cracking!

Later, alligators!