It’s time for nerdypage.com to get an upgrade. Primarily it needs some content, but that’s a more complicated problem. For now I’m going to focus on dealing with the fact that my hastily thrown together, hand coded HTML is an embarrassment.

Screenshot of the old nerdypage.com

Over the years I’ve tinkered with various web development tools. My first simple website was built using Adobe GoLive. Shortly after that I overhauled it using Adobe ImageReady slices to generate a graphical header and menu, with hand coded HTML for the rest of my website content. Hand coding HTML and CSS was fun but I always found it frustrating to produce correct code that would render consistently on different browsers, and that was before web browsing on mobile devices became common. More recently I used Word Press to quickly setup a small web presence for my wife’s Piano Studio. Word Press provides an easy way to create a decent looking, mobile ready, website, but it requires a LAMP stack and I think it’s a little bit overkill for what I want to do with nerdypage.com.

I decided to use a static site generator this time to keep things simple; it’s also cheaper to host a static site. After a brief search of the available options I decided to take Jekyll for a spin. The installation was frictionless and I’m already familiar with markdown. Liquid is new to me, but I’ve used the Jinja templating engine and it looks similar at first glance. So far I’m very happy with it. Now I just need to post something interesting and I’ll be on my way toward having a worthwhile website.