You are on this site right now! It doesn’t need much of an explanation. It’s pretty much just my “portfolio,” if you would like to call it that.

I had never used a static site generator before and figured it would be fun to learn, so I built it using jekyll. I created a jekyll collection for my projects, used a little ruby (which I’ve also never used before) to auto-create the tag pages based on the tag properties of my posts and projects collection, and built the rest with scss and plain old html. It’s hosted on S3 and delivered with CloudFront using certs from ACM.

Update 12/13/18

One fun side-note: jekyll posts are a privileged type of collection that is treated differently than user-created collections in a few ways. Most pertinent to me is the fact that the tag and category properties of user collections don’t get added to the global site.tags and site.collections lists. I wanted this to happen so that I could refer to both blog posts and projects. Paul Robert Lloyd had made a PR and solved this problem already (thanks again Paul!), so I had been using his changes to the jekyll source code in order to do this.

However, when I started working on my friend’s site I realized that I didn’t want to use this version of jekyll as I wanted site.categories to behave like normal (in case we added collections down the line). So I used Paul’s changes and added a slight tweak of my own that now allows for a setting in _config.yml that specifies whether to include collection tags and categories in the site global object.

Update 12/29/21

When finally dusting this old site off I see that someone has solved the above problem with a plugin, jekyll-tagories, which I am now using instead of my above solution. Thanks ashmaroli!