Okay, so picture this — I was seriously bored out of my mind. I mean, for the past ten days, my meals were all over the place, and I couldn’t resist snacking like there was no tomorrow. To make matters worse, Netflix had nothing interesting to offer, and House M.D. mysteriously vanished from Prime Video in my region. As if that wasn’t enough, I hadn’t left my dorm room in three days! It was time for a change, I needed a distraction. I could have worked on one of my academic projects, it is not like I had any shortage of work to do. But here’s the deal: I just couldn’t muster the strength to spend yet another weekend working on one of those projects. Thus, blogging it was! Though it wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be. Let me break it down for you.

First things first, let’s address the big question: why did I even want to write a blog in the first place? The TL;DR version is — clout farming! We’ll discuss this another time. For now, let’s talk about building this blog.

I had a bunch of platform options in mind — WordPress, Wix, Google sites, or maybe just hopping on the Medium bandwagon. They all had their perks, especially less coding, which sounded pretty sweet. But here’s the thing — I wanted something integrated with my academic web-page. You know, the one I’ve had for a decade (I don’t know why though? :unamused:). It was written in HTML, and while it got the job done, managing a blog solely with HTML? It would be a nightmare. I briefly contemplating building a website from scratch, but who has the patience to learn all the ins and outs for it, CSS, JavaScript, and whatnot? Seriously, I’m no Harvard undergrad creating the precursor to the biggest social network on the planet in a drunken coding frenzy from my dorm room while blogging at the same time. By the way, if you didn’t catch that reference, you need to watch “The Social Network” ASAP!

Getting back to track, I found a sweet spot — GitHub Pages. I had hosted my academic web-page on GitHub Pages for a while now and I found some awesome templates to integrate a blog with an andacademic web-page. A couple caught my eye: https://al-folio.github.io/ and https://academicpages.github.io/. But here’s the kicker — I wanted readers to be able to comment right beneath my blog posts. That’s why I decided to go with al-folio, although I am yet to implement the comments part. Implementing the template on my GitHub account was a breeze — just followed the instructions in the README.md (https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio). Well, almost a breeze — I did run into a tiny snag with installing jekyll and bundle (will cover that in a post where I discuss how to build a personal web-page).

Once I had the basic website template up and running, it was time to add my personal touch. Sure, I needed the usual “about” section and a blog, but I wanted more. I wanted a special section to showcase my publications. Alright, alright, I don’t have an overflowing library of papers just yet (:cry:). But assuming that I’ll have one sometime in the near future, you know what would make it cooler? Adding the journal covers to my publications, just like Liton Majumdar’s website I saw. It took a few minutes to track down where the images should be stored, but I got there in the end.

Oh, and get this — the template allowed me to include my CV right there on the web! Now, I didn’t want to just copy and paste my full CV (you need to click on the PDF icon for that). So, I decided to showcase items from the past three years, with my education background as the obvious exception.

And guess what? As I was documenting the whole process of building this website — I had unknowingly (:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) crafted my very first blog post. So here we are.