Hello World!

A new page is born! This blog is the first completed feature of my new, Jekyll-generated web presence.

mark_post_image My portrait I use for the frontpage. I shot that image last summer with my own studio equipment.

Hello World! I’m happy to announce my first blog post on my personal webpage! :D It marks the official beginning of my new web presence. (And I’m glad the domain rothermel.me was still available!)

This webpage is generated using Jekyll

My entire homepage is static. I use the static site generator Jekyll to build this page. It’s my first time to use a static site generator, but it’s not the first time I designed a webpage. For example, I designed the homepage of Matheball, the mathematician’s dancing ball at my university.

The setup of Jekyll and Ruby was quite a mess. Fortunately, you need to do that once, and the rest goes off like a charm. I found it relatively easy to construct and design this page. It’s even responsive! In fact, the frontpage is continuously responsive, that is, it adjusts its contents smoothly to each and every common window size.

frontpage screenshot Screenshot of the current frontpage. (If you watch the dark background closely, you may notice a slight border caused by the background image. This is because the image contains a little noise, but the webpage’s background color doesn’t. (I already know a fix for that.))

Surely, I’m not a master designer, but I’m quite happy with this page so far. :) The theme I built upon is called “Dark Poole.” I added several Bootstrap 5 elements.

Static sites also have their drawbacks. For example, interactivity comes very short, i.e., you cannot like blog posts or write comments (although there are workarounds for the latter).

However, static sites are easy to maintain, and you don’t need an own server. I use GitHub Pages to host this page.

Blog posts in English and German

The posts I publish in this blog will be either in English or in German language, depending on the topic and on the relevance. For example, posts relating to German politics will stick to my native language German while contributions to, e.g., Machine Learning will be in English.

By the way, the original format of these blog posts is Markdown. Jekyll then translates them into the corresponding HTML file.

Planned features: Project list and Instagram feed

Right now, only this blog is implemented. More features are underway, including a list of all my noteworthy projects, and a page showing my Instagram feed. So far, so good!