Hello World! Chelsey and I made a blog! We wanted a repository for our stories- a place that we could share with friends, family, and strangers following in our footsteps. Those footsteps have been many and spread wide, starting in Austin and bringing us here to Beijing, our temporary home for this year.
In our first hundred days in Beijing we have already visited Hong Kong, the Great Wall, and Japan, I’ve already broken two toes, and Chelsey bought a scooter. You can expect blog posts about those trips soon. We will probably also have some things to say about the natural topics of pollution, traffic, technology, hutongs, internet, food, China… There is probably little more to contribute about those topics beyond what others have already said. This blog is partly just our story, our perspectives, and our platform for communicating.
A note on the format.
We’re using jekyll and GitHub Pages. All of the source code is open source here. We decided on this ostensibly techy system because MGS had some experience with it, CDC saw it as a learning opportunity, and it is easy to write blog posts in mardown format. MGS was also jazzed to coax CDC into using distributed version control and markdown (these are tools generally associated with computer programming, but are really just tools for open collaboration). The general idea of jekyll is that you write the blog post as a markdown file with some metadata, and jekyll automatically generates a static html website. All the formatting and layout is abstracted into themes. Chelsey and I first chose a slightly powerpoint-animation-esque theme from here, but have recently updated to a more modern theme. We’re still experimenting with this aspect, so let us know what you think, especially if you have any experience with this sort of thing.
The other advantage of GitHub-Pages is that it’s not blocked on this side of the Great Firewall. So it’s pretty much a win-win-win-win.
Another note on the layout– eventually you’ll be able to tell who’s writing which post based on the image and name at the top of the post. For now, the default is that both of us appear as the author for all articles. We even filed a GitHub issue to figure this out.
Ok, that’s all for now.