I use this website to document some of my projects. Rather than host static pages myself, I decided to go with GitHub pages. It’s just easier and no cost.
At first the page was a mess of copy-pasted HTML. It did the job, but it didn’t look very good and was tedious to update.
Jekyll (what GitHub pages builds with) is nice because it naturally offers features which compliment well to a blog. (Is this a blog? I don’t intend to treat it as one.) The ability to pick from pre-built themes is useful, but I didn’t like the idea of hosting my personal website with somebody else’s template. Seeing the same theme elsewhere takes away from the personal aspect of a personal website.
I mangled together a theme using a combination of the existing CSS from that first page, and the defaults that are supplied by minima (the default Jekyll theme). I thought this looked nice, I think I changed enough of it to call it my own.
I know close to nothing about Ruby or Jekyll, but I knew that themes were packaged. I figured it would make sense to package my theme and apply it to the content, rather than apply a theme and further modify the theme after.
Also, I decided after however long of using the same theme that I could give these pages attention. The theme that I use on this page is called “names_are_hard”, and can be found in its Git repo on my GitHub account. It’s mostly made from scratch. I heavily relied on minima as an example of how to make a theme, but tried to keep it original. I also used a reset SCSS by GitHub user hcatlin.
I don’t expect anyone other than myself to use this template (but go ahead if you want, MIT license). I used this page as a way to clean up some code and get a refresher in webpage styling along the way. Even if it’s not very good.