Hello, world!

Hello, world! I've decided it's time to restart my blog.

I'm a computer science student and programmer living in Boston with interests in functional programming and concurrent computing.

I've had several blogs in the past - mostly self hosted wordpress blogs. Wordpress offers a lot of functionality that I don't need for a simple blog, so I was excited to learn about static site generators.

Since my blog will be serving identical pages, there's really no need for a backend. Rather than storing posts and pages in a database, a static site generator, as the name suggests, creates static HTML from a mix of templates, markdown, and css. For mirango.io I decided to use Jekyll.

Feel free to take a look at the source for Mirango.io. It's available on GitHub along with the Nginx configuration file. If you're interested in using Jekyll yourself, I've provided a short installation guide below.

Short guide to installing Jekyll on your local computer

# Install rvm and ruby (stable)
$ curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby

# Install the jekyll gem
$ gem install jekyll

# Create a new jekyll site (jekyll will create the basic file structure and configuration files)
$ jekyll new siteName

# Move into the newly created file
$ cd siteName

# Builds the site (takes all the files and outputs the static site in the _site folder)
$ jekyll build

# Creates a development web server at localhost:4000
$ jekyll serve

If you're interested in creating a jekyll site, GitHub will host the site for free. Check out https://pages.github.com.