An inaugural blog post - Aaron Tan's Blog

Why start a blog? If you asked my third-grade teacher Ms Riley, she’d tell you that “It looks cool and shows off your English skills.” Refer to our French IB course, and you’ll get “le blogue est par essence un espace individuel d’expression, caractérisé par une grande liberté éditoriale.” Realistically, the second categorization is what this blog will aspire to be - something something fifth estate and decentralization - but most of the posts on here will end up falling in the first (albeit probably with a less sophisticated vocabulary than ideal).

Plus, it seems like the trendy thing these days seems be to create a personal landing page and also a blog or a blogging engine to show off technical skills, so here I am.

What powers this blog

This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages. To a somewhat frugal person like me, cost for hosting was one of the more important factors, so I looked for free solutions. Although Heroku’s free plan and probably even Dropbox would have worked, given how low-traffic I expect this blog to be, I already had experience setting up and running single-purpose websites hosted on GitHub (like this or this). This made the barrier to entry a lot lower for me personally.

Not only is GitHub Pages free, it also helps that they have what essentially amounts to a step-by-step guide to building blogs with Jekyll. With some very pretty themes and, more importantly, ability to completely customize and modify the webpage, Jekyll made it very easy to set up and deploy a blog. Plus, Jekyll has good templating support with Liquid, making it super easy to generate pages for individual posts with a consistent look.

Speaking of templates, this first version of the blog uses a template called Scribble. I chose this theme because it’s (again) free, very clean with lots of whitespace, easy to modify (99% of the styling is done with a minified version of Tachyons), and looks good on both desktop and mobile. I quite enjoy it now, but I’ll probably get sick of it at some point and get a new theme or even try my hand at writing one.

All of these posts are written with Markdown, and built automatically with Jekyll. The convenience of this approach is that I can write with any text editor I want, have basically all the formatting options that I could possibly need, and have tiny, non-resource heavy files that are portable anywhere.

Why not Medium or Tumblr?

One word: control.

I don’t want to be bound to a centralized service where the content I create might not be easily exportable. Yes, ironic given that I’m using GitHub to host it, but I could theoretically move it off if necessary. I guess I’m a data hoarder.
I don’t want to have to use a boring, uniform (but admittedly beautiful) design like Medium enforces. I’m an individual, dammit! If I can’t tell the world that through using a pre-made theme on my soap-box blog, then who will know?
I don’t want to rely on proprietary editors to create or edit posts; especially on mobile. My approach lets me use my current preferred text editors - Sublime Text on desktop and Drafts on mobile. Particularly important for me is the ability for Drafts to run custom JavaScript snippets on things that I write - in this context, it lets me format my Markdown the way that Jekyll likes it with one tap, and also have an HTML preview generated to make sure that I didn’t confuse those pesky brackets for links again.
Tumblr is owned by Yahoo!, a moribund company, which is in turn owned by Verizon, another company I’m not particularly fond of. ‘Nuff said.

Aaron, what could you ever actually write about that could be interesting?

– Ellen Huang, 2017 (minorly paraphrased)

No definite answer to that yet, but it’ll probably be a combination of stuff that I’m working on (siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide projects), life at uWaterloo, and some of my exceptionally diverse and multitudinous hobbies. It’ll probably also be an interesting exercise to look back at this in a few years and cringe either at (a) the lack of self-awareness, or (b) the rash decision to continue in spite of crippling self-awareness. Time will tell.

In any case, this post is already longer than the combined number of words that I’ve written for all of the first week of homework assignments at Waterloo. Probably a good sign that I should stop rambling and sign off now. Hope you’re here for the next time that I post!