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Discussion on: Tell me about your personal dev site/blog

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Nirav Nikhil

I've experimented with a few setups over the years and this is what I'm using right now:

  • Jekyll + a fairly common blog theme, lightly customized
  • GitHub Pages
  • Forestry

As a young web developer, my first instinct, a few years back, was to design the entire website on my own. I read books on typography and design, and all that. I built the thing meticulously, with all over the top features I could think of, some so subtle I couldn't even see it (vertical rhythm, hanging punctuations ...)

Turns out, it takes a lot of time to maintain a website. I'd be running into bugs and edge cases, and yet kept on coding new features. For every new post something had to be tweaked or added (photo lightbox, prettier tables, dividers). There was always some tangential work I had to do to make the post look perfect.

My advice to you is: set up the simplest/most familiar system that will afford you your desired features and then forget about it. For me, it happens to be GitHub pages and Forestry. The theme takes away most of my choice, and lets me focus on what's really important: writing.