It's been a long time...

Thanks, Jekyll

Well, Github recommends this and it does look good. With Jekyll and github.io, I finally get something that might be prettier, faster and easier to write blog. This was on my todo list long time ago when I migrated almost all my personal logs to Markdown. Besides blog, I need a customizable personal webpage, that I could also upgrade all my old pages generated by TeX, my personal project log (mostly in Vimwiki, Vim's orgmode) in markdown, resume and many other things like social media etc., so that I could just write once and distribute as I need. After some research, Jekyll seems to offer most I need.

... and Many Others

FrontEnd world is like a bazzar, a lot of fancy goodies that doesn't require any js programming to put them together. MDL seems very cool to give a shot; Bootstrap is very basic and Fancybox also helps for images; and many more are honored in footer page. Maybe eventually I'll rewrite front end into single page app, but for now, I'm fine with this blog work flow. At last besides these front end goodies, I think it's cooler to add WebGL js code to show my taste of website 😀.

Design

For layout, I need to keep in mind: mobile-first-or-at-least-very-important and power friendly (WebGL ~10FPS). Therefore, I chose the safer way to start with Jekyll's minimia theme (basically scratch) and built this fancier webpage by adding all other components one after another. It's also a learning process of fun.

The color was inspired by my day dream in summer time, laying under the cloudy and not-hot-at-all sun, and looking at the ocean under the sky, with a refreshing cool drink in hand. Anyway, it's hot summer outside now, and I apparently like this color and also painted one of my room like this...

After all these efforts, I hope most people will agree that the new webpage and the painted room looks much better than before 😅!

I have to say old one has a nice color design (UIowa's Black and Gold) though... You might still see some of the old pages, not upgraded, around. As comparison, here is the new page screenshot :

What I feel most unique is the top bar with procedural ocean waves (even though we could have long argue for gif animation vs webgl). It's the lake/ocean ShaderToy with some modification to coporate nicely with others. I also tried to reduce the framerate, and adjust the shader paramters so it fits my top bar. If there's no WebGL available, it could fall back to the plain old background. At last of course, to make sure it runs on all types of modern devices!