This blog is hosted on Github using Jekyll. I’ve blogged before using Wordpress and Ghost but never have I experienced such freedom as Jekyll offers. A long, long time ago I started a Wordpress blog at 000webhost. I was just a script kiddie then – a n00b – and was innocent and dumb to the dishonesty of the web. Like most users I was drawn in by these tempting words.

Like the fool I am, I believed them and signed up for a free website. Everything went well for a few weeks. Then almost imperceptibly my website began to load slower and slower until one day it took nearly a minute to load. A week later I was told I had used up all the bandwidth allocated to me and so my website would be put in cold storage until the next month. The inexplicable thing was that I had been promised a 100GB of free web traffic a month. I was a fledgling website and I had not even had a hundred visitors that month. On average each of my web page was less than a kilobyte in size.

I began looking for other offers of free web hosting. Lest my readers thing I’m a commie who expects everything for free, let me clarify that I had only the most noblest of intentions. I wanted to build a little blog and write some little things and code some little codes that would do little things. Was that too much?

The next part of my saga led me to a web hosting provider called Wink. Although I got what I wanted and more importantly, for free I was unsatisfied. You see, their control panel was cheesy and sucked. After having learnt my lesson I looked around for a cheap paid web hoster.

Around that time I was learning a new programming language called Ruby. I fell in love with it and was absolutely stolen by how intuitive it was. The code was beautiful and sophisticated. I also switched to Linux and started using the terminal by this time. Unknown to myself, I was metamorphosing into a serious web developer – a code junky. After mastering the basics of Ruby I decide to graduate myself and learn Ruby on Rails. Ruby’s uptown cousin on the web. I was told by the good doctor that I had two choices – deploy my code on Heroku’s world class infrastructure for free or deploy on Redhat’s open source Openshift web platform for not a penny paid. A tough choice. I chose Redhat over Heroku for reasons I could not comprehend. It turned out to be a good decision.

To use Openshift I had to learn Git and was introduced to Github for the first time. I was immediately blown away by the sheer force of personality. To think there was an entire community of code loving geniuses hiding away their code on the web like so many acorn loving cartoon squirrels! I was in seventh heaven. Here finally was my promised land. I was introduced to Github pages and how I could deploy my webpage there. Deploy not Host! Deploy seemed to me a nice change from the arid sandy waste into which I had been cast. I learned about the Ghost blogging platform and flirted with her on Openshift before finally chancing on Jekyll.

When I look back I often wonder why I had not settled down with Jekyll before. To be sure I knew about Jekyll before but I always looked down on it as the unpolished cousin of Wordpess and other CMSes. How wrong I was! In fact it was the other way around. Wordpress had defiled blogging by making too many themes and plugins while separating the heart from the soul. While Jekyll was so different: powerful, yet elegantly usable. I was introduced to sass, the liquid templating language and yaml. I even built a theme for Jekyll of which I was sufficiently proud. And in the end I build this – the stuff you’re reading. I was one hell of a journey but worth each and every moment.