I finally got the site up and running. This was not as painful as I thought it would be.

I chose to use jekyll instead of using a CMS system such as wordpress because of its simplicity.

With jekyll, making a new post is as simple as creating a markdown file and running a command to generate the site. Because the site is all static there is no need to configure things like PHP, MySQL etc.

While setting up this site I did encounter a couple of challenges.

Challenge #1: Configuring Ruby

By default macOS comes pre installed with ruby, however every time I tried installing a gem I would get a permission error. Upon further reading, I found out that a better way to use ruby was to use some kind of ruby version manager. I ended up installing rbenv. After following their clear instructions on the readme and configuring my PATH, I was able to use a different installation of ruby to install and run jekyll without any errors.

Challenge #2: Configuring Apache

This was the first time I configured Apache to serve two domains simultaneously. Turns out it is super easy to configure multiple sites under one server. All I had to do was create a configuration file in apache’s sites_available directory (I just copied the example one there and tweaked it), then enable said configuration with the a2ensite command, restart and it just worked.

This guide from digital ocean was a huge help.

Overall, setting this site up was an interesting experience and I look forward to messing around with jekyll soon.