Back in 2012 I built my first Rails app from scratch. It was a little blog that was meant as a learning tool and a way to contribute back to a community that gives so much to beginngers (gems, mentoring, etc).

I learned a lot from that blog, it helped me get jobs, and kept me accountable for the things I learned. It served as both a place to try new features and to record things I learned. It was where I built my first admin system, wrote about learning to build a forgot password form, everything.

But I realized I was neglecting it. I dreaded Rails security vulnerabilities, server vulnerabilities, and the chore that upgrading it to the next verison of Rails was going to be. It was also in desperate need of a design overhaul and didn’t look great on mobile browsers.

A few weeks ago I decided that I was tired of all of the above, and that my little blog had served it’s purpose well more than I had expected too. It helped me grow my career and myself.

Earlier today I swapped my blog to Github pages. I have to say I am very impressed with Jekyll even though I’ll miss my little Rails blog that I built from scratch. Jekyll is very powerful with great documentation. I was able to basically recreate my blog with the same URLs, RSS feed, and all. I have a front-end background so I was able to make my own theme quickly and easily.

The one caveat is that Github pages runs on a different version of Jekyll so some of the things in the documentation aren’t correct for that version. Once I figure that out though it was smooth sailing.

For posterity, here’s a picture of the old blog. I’m going to miss it.

Previous Site Screenshot