This blog was created quite some time ago but has not received any update in ages! One of the reasons behind was the fact that although it was fun to create, the setup to create new posts was fragile and required a number of ruby / npm packages in order to generate the site. At some point in 2015 I changed distro to Archlinux and procrastinated installing the required setup. Well, fast forward few years and in 2018 I got motivated again to blog and decided to look at the flourishing static website generator ecosystem.…

Like the majority of the people nowadays, I interact with a computer most of my day - either for work or for leisure. Anything that makes working with a computer more comfortable or healthier can make a big difference. A year ago I managed to get one of these standing desks and I started looking a bit more on the keyboard side of things. I started reading more and more on /r/MechanicalKeyboards and I sold out on the benefits of mechanical keyboards.…

I work daily with an editor and I’ve already shared with you guys my love for Sublime Text. This doesn’t mean I do not try and get interested in other editors. I actually follow and contribute (ok - only once so far) to the Brackets editor which I found very interesting but at the end not entirely covering my use cases/workflow. Recently Github released their own editor - Atom. I wanted to test it out, but at the moment there are only Mac builds.…

Because Jekyll only serves static html pages, I need to use another component/system, that will handle and store the comments for me. Disqusis one of the different solutions out there and is definitely the one that handles the most traffic in the web (interesting read How Disqus Went Realtime With 165K Messages Per Second And Less Than .2 Seconds Latency). How to setup Disqus in your Jekyll blog Step1: Sign up for an account Head to Disqus and sign up for an account.…

I use Sublime Text 3 in a daily basis, and I’ve grown used to certain plugins/setup that make it much more productive for me. Getting it (Ubuntu) Option 1: use 3rd party PPA repository: 1 2 3 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer Option 2: install from source 1 2 wget http://c758482.r82.cf2.rackcdn.com/sublime-text_build-3059_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i sublime-text_build-3059_amd64.deb Customize Sublime Text Change fonts Install and use custom font - I use Adobe Source Code Pro font: Download the font:…

As mentioned previously, I wanted to write a post on how this blog has been built. This website does not contain any interactive content: everything is static and fast - extremely fast. This is to focus on content rather than getting distracted by fancy visual effects. This blog is built from scratch using Jekyll. As described in their website: Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server.…

One of the caveats of using “vanilla” Jekyll (vs using other tools that are built on top of Jekyll such as Octopress or JekyllBootstrap) is that there is some plumbing to do to add things that are “expected” on a blog engine, such as an RSS feed. An RSS feed comes handy for people that want to follow your site and consolidate everything into an RSS reader (such as feedly).…

Hello all! This is my second blogging attempt. One of the reasons (among others) I stopped blogging back then was the pain associated to maintaining a server and the services where the blog was running on (LAMP + Wordpress). The web has been in a revolution lately, and new technologies have been swarming and being developed. HTML5, css, Javascript, have evolved to highs no-one could have imagined few years ago. A lot of new concepts, frameworks and tools have emerged and have reached a maturity level where they are starting to challenge other more traditional stacks and languages.…