I have a hunch: the time of year during which the most new blogs are started is around new-years. So it should come as no surprise that one of my New-Years resolutions was to finally get a blog of my own. I had been learning all sorts of exciting web technologies recently including Node.js and Python. Fittingly, I even programmed a blog as a final assignment for a course at NYU (check it out: KrimmerBlog) using Python and Google AppEngine. While it was a lot of fun to build, GAE seemed a bit of overkill for hosting a simple blog. So for a long time I was sure that I would end up using Wordpress. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Wordpress is a wonderful platform. Heck, my wife’s gorgeous website is in Wordpress. However, every time I sat down to start building something I felt overwhelmed with the number of themes and plugins. It didn’t help that the language of choice in Wordpress is PHP. Three days ago I sat down and decided it was time to bite the bullet.

I had a few projects which I wanted to highlight on my blog. As a first step, I figured it was time to start using Github. I know, I know, every programmer should be using some sort of public version control system. It took me a while to warm to the idea that other people might benefit from seeing some of my code. While getting set up I came across GitHubPages and immediately abandoned my plans to use Wordpress. Picking up Jekyll was a piece of cake, and I used Bootstrap as a template. I found a few tutorials on Google that were very thorough and helpful, although they were for an older version of Jekyll and required a bit of tinkering.

By the way, my hunch seems to be correct: wordpress has metrics on the number of new blog posts broken down by month. It seems that in 2011 and 2012 there was a ramp-up in the number of new posts through Nov-Dec-Jan, after which the number kind of plateaus.

May we all have a wonderful 2014!