Site Implementation: Part One

I dislike CSS, I am not going to lie about it. I'd rather be mowing the lawn or cleaning dishes at a busy restaurant. It's not my strong point and I feel that in most cases unnecessary development time tends to be lost designing even more unnecessary UIs. When a friend advised I should start a site to display my work, I died a little inside. I powered through it and the result is what you see before you. Initially it was an html site, nothing too fancy. The result was... less than ideal. So I scrapped it, sat down and wrote out what I wanted for my site.

Wishlist:
1. It to work.
2. It to be as low cost as possible.
3. It to do all the heavy lifting while I do the heavy writing.

Now #1 is easier said than done, you could spend hours on something and then realize it doesn't work or doesn't do what you want to. To anyone who has worked in the IT field either on a personal or professional level, rabbit holes just come with the experience.

So I began my search hoping that I wouldn't end up in a rabbit hole. (Who knows, when I post this I might realize I am missing something) That's when I stumbled on Ghost (https://ghost.org/), an open source blogging platform that allows creators to share their content.

Great now most of the backend is handled, but now I just need to make my site stand out, but I can't use one of their suggested templates because everyone else is using that. I wanted sleek, responsive and light-weight (no one wants to load a website that then loads 300 scripts).

That's when I stumbled upon the template Uno-Zen (https://github.com/Kikobeats/uno-zen).

New problem: It hasn't been updated in over two years.

I mean it worked but it wouldn't compile which would deadlock me into minimal configuration changes if not resolved. Soooo I forked it, and you can see the results below:

GitHub - MrGiga/uno-zen-revised: Revised Minimalist and Elegant theme for Ghost. Demo @ https://johncurcio.com

Revised Minimalist and Elegant theme for Ghost. Demo @ https://johncurcio.com - GitHub - MrGiga/uno-zen-revised: Revised Minimalist and Elegant theme for Ghost. Demo @ https://johncurcio.com

GitHubMrGiga

What did I do?

1. Implemented a dockerized development environment which displays a Ghost blog with the custom template and auto-reloads when changes are detected.
2. Refactored the Gulp (https://gulpjs.com/) implementation to the latest version which allowed me to compile it.
3. Refactored the template to work with the latest version of Ghost.

What still needs to be done?

1. Dockerfile needs to be minimized.
2. Documentation needs to be updated.
3. Mobile site seems to be having some minor issues.

What's next?

Keeping the site as low cost as possible. Which you can read about in Part 2.