Welcome...
...to my blog for CIS 235, Web Programming I!
I have a confession to make: This isn’t your grandparents’ HTML (and, to be honest, my grandparents never heard of HTML, which wasn’t invented until late in their lives). This blog is actually maintained in Markdown, which is a form of simplified markup language that is—luckily!—interoperable with HTML tags, ΗΤΜL řėŝèƦ℣Əƌ & ƯƞƗƆƟƉƐ ¢haracters, and CSS housed within <style> tags. For instance, the following copy is responsible for styling the colors of this page’s background and text.
<style>
body {
background: peachpuff;
color: black;
}
...
</style>
One can even include inline graphics. (Surf, Ferris, surf!)
As you probably know, GitHub.com, which hosts this blog site in one of my repositories, deploys Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby, to render Markdown as HTML. This architecture is responsible for most of the public-facing text you encounter in that site’s repositories, and it makes it possible to host a blog site without setting up a database to flesh out the site content. Combining the stripped-down markup of Markdown with a sprinkling of CSS and a beaker full of Jekyll alchemy can lead to rapid drafting and publication of blog posts. In total, from blog site setup to blog post publication, this task probably consumed about 20 minutes of my time.
Other tools I used to construct this site include:
- IDE: JetBrains WebStorm
- VCS: Git/GitHub
- Static Content: Gimp
That’s all for now. I am off to conduct my search for seven websites to critique...