Tim Jacobs

Blasting into the blogosphere

In an effort to develop my writing skills, increase my web presence, and play with cool web technologies, I've decided to start this personal website. I plan to use this space as a place to document my various projects and share my opinions about science and technology.

To start off, it seems fitting to talk briefly about the infrastructure backend to this site. A while back a project I work on as part of my graduate work, Rosetta, switched from SVN to GIT. Fortunately, this switch forced me to become quite familiar with (thanks in large part to the excellent, and free, Pro Git book. Since then, I've completely drank the Koolaid. I love Git. My programming workflow has become so much more streamlined, and I'm addicted the natural portability. I can easily move between my various machines at home and work, and it's as if I never left. I should note that this isn't entirely thanks to git, tmux plays a large part in this portability as well, but that's a topic for another post, back to Git. Since our Rosetta transition, I've been quick to adopt any git-based technology I can. For instance, I've lead an effort to move Rosetta documentation to a Gollum, the git-driven wiki. In keeping with the git-theme, this site is hosted on github, and is driven by Jekyll, which allows me to write my posts in 'plain text' (markdown, technically), and publish via a simple 'git push'. So far, things have been working really well. I spent a bit of time picking a design (not my strong point, so I grabbed one from the experts over at HTML5 UP), and modifying it to work with my Jekyll setup. I'm sure I'll have a lot more tweaking to do once I add some content; but for now, I'm happy. I'm happy to share my setup with anyone interested, just send me an e-mail using the link at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, feel free to browse the source from my github page.