I think I starting learning about Jekyll in early 2020. I had come across Tom Preston-Werner’s origin story: Blogging Like a Hacker and decided I also wanted to ‘blog like a hacker’. My interest in mainstream social media sites was fading but I needed a place to put my thoughts and pictures. It was important to me that my blog would be free of costs and that anyone, even non-hackers, would be able to fork and use their own versions. It is for these reasons that I landed on the combination of services used and listed below. Every component is free to access and a configured, browser-based CMS is included for those who don’t code. I consciously chose to interface with these companies not because I support them, but because these are the tools I found that are available for the job. My hope is to inspire further divestment from the corporate network. This is version 1.0.

Becca’s Inventory was built on Jekyll and was written using VS Code. The files are stored in a GitHub repository which you can fork here. I am using Netlify as a free user to compile and deploy the repository, and Netlify CMS is installed to access and edit my content from a browser. My only overhead cost is my custom domain, which I purchased from Porkbun for $8.58 a year.

Resources:
• Setup your Mac for development, 2020 edition (slightly out of date, but a good introduction for beginners to get their basic code environment installed)
• Jekyll Documentation
• Create a Multi Blog Site with Jekyll (I am following this model of creating multiple feeds based on a structure of category folders)
• Jekyll::Paginate V2 (because I’m using multiple feeds, my system is dependent on this plugin for pagination of individual categories)
• Installing Netlify CMS for Jekyll
• Netlify CMS Widgets Documentation
• Multiple SSH Keys for Different GitHub Accounts (not essential, but I created a new GitHub account to store only this repository and so this article helped me figure out how to authenticate into multiple accounts on a per-project level)

If you have questions, feel free to email me at: bee3s@pm.me

This project wouldn’t be possible without a lot help from my friends. I am so grateful to Ian G. for first introducing me to Netlify and the concept of a free website, j9 for everything but especially helping me overcome my fear of command line, fanfare for chat support and talking through ideas, Natalia P. for a fruitful conversation in April 2020, Will K. for agreeing to be my guinea pig, and Gordon F. and Elizaveta S. for their encouragement during the final steps of coding.

Becca’s Inventory is dedicated to KDX.

Launch: May 16, 2021