Welcome to my first blog post! My plan for this website is to post about things that I’m working on (probably mostly CS-related or adjacent) every week.

I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while but the way I had my website configured for the past year or two just wasn’t conducive to adding blog posts. I’d built the website using React, so there was a significant amount of overhead to add new posts to my page. Arguably, I could have probably found a way to make the process more fluid and automated but I just never got around to it.

In the past year or two, I started learning much more about Emacs org-mode. I’d used the org files in a very rudimentary way previously but I was able to dive into the manual over the summer of 2020 and that really opened up my eyes to how feature rich that package is (my favorite is still exporting to PDFs that are rendered with LaTeX). One thing I stumbled across that stood out to me was that org can export your org files to HTML which can then be served with Jekyll. Since at the time I was (and still am) using GitHub pages to host my website (at least this blog portion for now) it seemed like a really easy way to build a blog without the headache of writing all the HTML myself.

I ended up running into quite a few roadblocks getting that setup to work smoothly, so I decided that it would be best to get the site running with vanilla Jekyll and then revisit the idea of publishing directly from Emacs later on.

So for now, I’ll be writing these posts in markdown while I sort out that org mode stuff. Honestly, Jekyll seems to be more than enough for my use case, but I also like fiddling with Emacs, plus I want to move my task tracking back to org mode/org agenda/org journal after trying out Notion for the past year or so, but that’s for another post 😉

In general, I plan to start by codifying the existing ideas and projects I’ve been working on and then hopefully move on to some new stuff 😃

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