First Post + Goals for this Website

11 Aug 2021

This is my first post on this personal site. I’m a big proponent of learning in public and I intend to use this site as a platform for fleshing out my own ideas. At the same time, it might give you an idea of what it’s like inside my brain (if you happen to be curious).

Goals:

• Have a Jekyll blog.
• Link my CV + SWE resume.
• Have royrin.github.io hosted on www.royrinberg.com.
• Set up my jekyll blog to also point to posts on medium - following this structure : link
• Add ability for comments.
• Add a sidebar on each post that will show the table of contents, like this site
• Potentially add goodreads widget: link
• Consider making this app a PWA.

Blog Goals

• Start airing out my Effective Altruism ideas, even if no one reads them, I can later link to them.
• Write a short post on 1. a summary of my time at Ouster 2. what am I trying to get out from Columbia

Code and formatting

Comments

I looked into a few solutions for adding comments, and ultimately settled on utterance, which uses Github issues to allow people to comment. It’s free and open-source, the only drawback is that people need to have a github account to comment. I doubt I’ll have too many comments (or any). Disqus is an alternative, but I didn’t see good free options.

Table-of-Contents

Playing around with the table of contents sidebar actually took a reasonable bit of time.

Ultimately I found 2 workable solutions,

1. through this repo: https://github.com/jwrr/minima-sidebar (see here), Which uses css, and can manually insert a table-of-contents to an individual post.

   <nav class="toc" style = "margin-bottom: 0;" markdown="1">
   **Table of Contents**
   
   * TOC
   {:toc}
   </nav>
   

2. And the other through this repo : https://github.com/allejo/jekyll-toc. Which uses a nav tag in the html in post.html to automatically generate a table-of-contents for all posts, by pointing to table_of_contents.html

    <nav class="toc" markdown="1">
    <b>Table of Contents</b>
    { % include table_of_contents.html html=content %} ### with no space between "{" and "%".
    </nav>