If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve realized it exists. Why do I have a blog now? Well, I figured out a particularly nice way of creating and maintaining one. I’ll still probably publish most of my content through more traditional sites, but stay tuned. I haven’t decided yet what exactly I’m going to include, and how this blog will be structured, so that is likely to be pretty variable.

So, how did I make this blog? It’s an example of a GitHub page.

Learn more about GitHub pages here:

https://pages.github.com/

I read an interesting blog post called “A blog site with Jekyll, Github Pages Eclipse Che and Codenvy” which described this method of blog publishing and linked to a simple, elegant template. I’ve had a GitHub Page for a while now, but the template was really critical, because I have very little background in building web pages. If I built a webpage from scratch myself it would probably look awful, and be difficult for me to sustainably maintain. So for a while I looked for online WYSIWYG editors and website creation products, and tried several. Unfortunately, few if any would let you export the websites you created, and using a 3rd party solution would just make the development process more involved.

Link: http://blog.sunix.org/articles/howto/2015/07/31/blog-site-with-jekyll-ghpages-codenvy.html

Similar blog: http://www.collegesip.com/make-simple-push-notifications-chrome-firefox/

I develop the site locally on my laptop, using the extensible template linked above. The article mentions several online editors / IDEs, but right now I’m using a text editor called Atom, which is very well integrated with GitHub. I don’t like that they decided to make their own package management system instead of building off an existing solution. That said, the mere existence of a package management system enables excellent modularity. The developers of Atom designed and built a framework called Electron which enables the creation of desktop applications using web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. Since Atom is mainly used by web developers, that should make it easy for them to create their own extensions and plugins.

Atom: https://atom.io/

Electron: http://electron.atom.io/

If you’re looking for an alternative to Atom, the next best thing is probably Brackets, which is developed by Adobe Systems.

Brackets: http://brackets.io/

Unfortunately, the developers of Brackets didn’t develop the same infrastructure of APIs and extensions, so it’s not as modular, but for most purposes it should make a fine replacement.

Finally, I’ll conclude this post by introducing NW.js (previously node-webkit), which is similar to Electron, but it’s older, makes heavier use of node.js, and has other technical differences too involved to explain in this post. Maybe later I’ll link to some comparisons. Until then, you can search for them yourself. :)

NW.js: nwjs.io