Hi, if you didn’t know already, my name is John Nutter. I’m a back-end web developer and Linux sysadmin. I have a passion for working with Ruby on Rails and Flask. I’m seeking any opportunity I can to write code using it. In this first post, I’m going to go over some details on how I created this site and the tools that I used. It’s not at all an exhaustive post, but just something I put together to get the ball rolling.
For starters, the website itself is built with Jekyll. I’m using version 4.0.0 at the time of this writing, along with Ruby version 2.6.3, and a few other gems. The template I’m using is a free Jekyll version of the “Forty” theme by HTML5 UP that I came across. I’ve made some edits to it, mainly removing sections that I don’t think I’ll use. So hopefully, everything makes sense.
I found favicon.co to quickly generate a favicon for the site using some of the main colors. For all of the index page images and posts, I’m using images found on the free site Pexels. The artists are a few scattered throughout, so I’m working on getting the details to add to the posts and give them credit. Though, the nice thing about this site is it’s totally royalty-free.
The site’s colors are where I struggle the most. I usually upload an image to Adobe Color and then pick out a color and tinker with it until I get something that I like. I’ll go through 100 different iterations of those colors and combinations before I can finally get something that I like. The hardest part is finding a color combination that looks good, represents me, and that I won’t get tired of later on. Darker backgrounds with brighter foreground tend to be the best combination for me.