Learning the Challenges of Jekyll

So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host all – well, most – of my writing. Jekyll, I’ve learned, is a different beast from most applications used for these purposes. I’ve found several themes that I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to use. I’m finding, though, that “easy to use” and “Jekyll” probably don’t belong in the same sentence. Each of the themes I’ve looked at require slightly different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear rather finicky. I’m sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven’t really spent much time with the software, it’s a challenge.

Getting Started with Ham Radio

One of the goals on my bucket list has been getting my Ham radio license. I don’t remember, really, when it first landed on my list. I was a teen and it most likely was the result of some movie I saw or book I read that extolled the use and excitement of reaching out to the world through radio. The desire wasn’t helped, I’m sure, by having an uncle that got into it after he retired.

Weewx on the Raspberry Pi

I’ve always loved gadgets. When the first Raspberry Pis came out a few years ago, I was pretty confident that eventually, I’d get one. About three years ago I decided I wanted to build a media server and the RPI seemed the perfect tool for the job. While it works, it didn’t do all that I had hoped. It wasn’t the device’s fault; the software just didn’t quite match up with my particular use case. So, the device sat idle for a while. 5}

Changes in my Weather Station

For the past 8 years I’ve managed a personal weather station consisting of a Davis Vantagse Pro and a Windows computer running the excellent Weather Display software. Last December I decided that the inexpensive computer I was running the scripts on may well be coming to its end-of-life and went looking for alternatives. Another goal of this move was to lower my cost of operations. The Jetway computer I was running didn’t use a lot of power, perhaps 25 W, but if I could do better, I would. After all, at 25 watts, that’s about 219 kW or $26.25 annually. With the growth of small computers such as the Raspberry Pi, I knew I could do better.

Blogging with Jekyll

Over the past nearly 10 years I’ve tried numerous times to maintain a blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don’t really care whether anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write.

The problem is that, while I don’t care so much if I’m read, I do want to be able to keep my files and refer back to them from time to time – something of a journal (which is what the blog was originally conceived to be). That means that I need the writing in form that is easily saved and retrieved. Another concern has been that I be able to write from essentially any computer, any where. I started, as most folks do, on Blogger, then moved to Wordpress, each time abandoning my work and the platform, as I moved to another. That’s not what I intended. Making the process more difficult is that the writing is stored in a database. This makes retrieval of the raw data difficult, particularly if you’ve forgotten the password, or the database is corrupt, etc. And, to be honest, those platforms are simply more complex than my needs. What I needed was a simple, easy to use platform that allowed me to maintain a file of my work.