Welcome to My Blog!

Welcome! I made this blog so I could post some of the things I learn on my journey through the field of computer science. I have been doing some work outside of school lately, requiring me to solve some problems that there aren’t many resources on the web about. This has led me to want to want to have a place where I can write about some of the things I find.

How I Made My Blog

I thought I’d start today by talking about how I got this blog set up. If you can’t tell from the style of the blog, I made this using Jekyll, a Ruby-based static website generator. The convenient part about using Jekyll is that it integrates very easily with GitHub Pages.

I already host my personal website using a GitHub Pages respository. I wanted to be able to add a blog to my website, without laying to waste all of the hard work I put into creating my website last summer. Whether or not I decided to use Jekyll became contingent on whether or not I could integrate it with my website, rather than trash everything I have.

Luckily, GitHub Pages works in a very convenient manner. Whenever you create a Pages site for a repository, it will automatically add it to your user website (i.e. jhbell.github.io). This functionality ended up being exactly what I needed to keep my website, and add a blog.

All I had to do was add a blog repository and turn on Pages from the repository settings. Now, this page is conveniently hosted at jeffreyhbell.com/blog/. To set up Jekyll, I used GitHub’s tutorial on setting up a Jekyll site locally, and then creating a new GitHub repository for the site.

What’s next?

I’ve been working on organizing a fairly large CMake project recently. I was able to integrate Google Test with the project after quite a bit of work. The problem right now is that I have to have the complete gtest library stored in the project (or symlinked), and it’s a little clunky.

I think that having a Docker image to contain the environment and dependencies will prove to be really useful. So, I am going to be looking into how to get all of that set up. I may post a tutorial on the simple way that I included gtest into my CMake project, since that in itself took a while for me to figure out. Until then, happy hacking!