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Aspiring Polymath

Why Blog?

I’ve decided to start writing a blog as a way to document my journey and help me stay focused. Blogging improves your writing skills and your research skills as well. You will have to proof read and fact check everything you post lest you make a mistake. Do feel free to comment using Disqus below. My posts will probably deal with Programming, Linux and some handy instructions or gotcha’s which I find useful. My posts will not be limited to technical topics though. I’d like to think of my blog as my personal Journal.1

I have had blogs before but I’ve never actively maintained any of them. As I write this post I’m in the process of figuring out how to delete my long since abandoned wordpress and blogger accounts. Unfortunately blogger does not allow you delete your profile without also deleting your google account.

I will be writing at least one post per week which in my opinion is an easier schedule to stick to than Jeff Atwood’s six posts per week.

How I set up my blog

I followed Joshua Lande’s excellent post on how to set up a fully functioning blog using Jekyll and hosted it for free on github using Github Pages. I can’t recommend Jekyll enough, it’s fast, simple, elegant and most importantly all posts are written in markdown. If you’ve never heard of it before, check this quora post. What I like most about Jekyll is the github integration, I can also easily roll back any changes I made to the site. Here’s the repository if you’re interested.

I use sublime text along with sublime-jekyll to ease my Jekyll workflow. I used namecheap for the domain registration. If you’re a student you can grab one for free through Github’s Student Developer Pack, they offer a lot of other free stuff too! To support https on a custom domain, I use Cloudflare, just follow these instructions. Github has not been very helpful to provide support for https on their end.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. If you liked this post, you can share it with your followers or follow me on Twitter!

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