Matt Ralston

Matt Ralston

M.Sc. Bioinfo + 5 years industry exp. - - - Looking for a position in biosciences. I'm gifted at the command line or computer terminal, but I perform best on my feet, standups, cleaning, guitar with samples in the centrifuge, more in the water bath, data being processed on the computer while I sleep, and other assays to plan. Currently writing a DNA sequence graph algorithm and manuscript (for bioRxiv). I play math rock on my guitar, I have some open-source software on GitHub, I pay my bills in the DE-NJ-PA tri-state area near Delco, and I'm launching a DE-based LLC for Univ. of Delaware and local NGS sequencing projects.

Site Redesign

1 minute read

Published:

Welcome!

Welcome to the new website, I’ve recently merged my blog Not Very Humerus with my static homepage. The point of this blog post is to introduce the reader to my experience theming with Jekyll and specifically the Bulma clean theme.

The best part of re-theming was the essential plug-and-play experience of copying my blog’s _post directory into the Jekyll theme and watching the site automatically populate with my blog’s content.

The biggest challenge was wrestling with the site’s site.baseurl and site.url in generating working links throughout. I’m not sure if that was a bug that was truly mine, but it seemed like the raw theme didn’t quite have the same problems. The problem started when I was changing the site.url to my localhost and eliminating site.baseurl in anticipation of the deployment to my primary Github static page.

Aside from fixing some broken links in the blog’s pagination, the purpose of exploring the possibilities by resetting site.baseurl was to simply get my meme popovers working again! After making the necessary adjustments, all of the memes display correctly on the site.

The short term goal for the website is to simplify the sites maintenance and deployment needs. To this end, I was looking at 2 or 3 themes for the site redesign, with bulma-clean and prologue being the two forerunners. At the time, I liked the idea of the prologue theme’s contact form using formspree.io but I couldn’t ignore the flexibility in templating offered by bulma-clean. After copying the contact form, I elected to go for the older template instead of the very responsive HTML5 design in prologue.

In the long term, I’d like to add a few applications and perhaps a more permanent solution to the contact page when I deploy the website to a dedicated server. But until that time, I’m very happy with the appearance and functionality of the site and its sections.

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