What good is this site if I’m too busy tooling around with the platform to generate content?

I didn’t want to borrow code and copy templates. I wanted the satisfaction of learning this platform from the ground up. I even planned to share nuggets of experience along the way, paying forward the benefits I enjoyed by digesting other’s work.

*didn’t
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.
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*wanted

Other people are smarter than me, more creative than me, and generously share ways to make this platform personal and attractive (on a subjective level). I’m taking my grandpa’s veiled advice on this one: “Some motherf***ers always trying to ice skate up hill.” I tell my interns something similar before I send them to the nightwalking afterlife: “You will never make it as a controls engineer if you think you write for loops better than everyone.”

Component integration is key to a good product. This product is supposed to be a launchpad for my commentary on the things I enjoy outside of my career. To do that I had to close the stack overflow threads, put down the sketchbook, and start vomiting perspective into notepad.

I’ve borrowed liberally from the following sources. Some provided explicit code, others just nuggets of insight for cleaner site management.

Jekyll-Uno Theme

• Core theme for blog look and feel
• Josh Gerdes Blog. Prepare for shameless and obvious similarities. Thanks to Josh for sharing this work.

Using Isotope to filter page content

• Awesome plugin to filter content on a single page. This solved a problem I set for myself wherein I wanted to manage more content with less navigation. I find the effects incredibly pleasant on mobile browser. I don’t know how scalable my personal implementation will be with hundreds of posts, but I’ll happily refine and share my learning.
• Chuck Grimmett Blog. Thanks to Chuck for sharing this work.

Working with Tags & Categories

• I wanted a browsable site model that starts by filtering all posts by category. Selecting any post within a category offers the further browsing of those category-posts by tags.
• Stephan Groß Blog. Thanks to Stephan for sharing this work.