In my previous Personal Website post. I mentioned the reasons for choosing to use Squarespace to create and host my site. After my free trial expired I hesitated to pay for a full year of Squarespace service. Out of curiosity, I checked to see how much dough I could get away with spending to buy a custom domain and host my site. I was not surprised to find that it is cheaper to host outside of Squarespace, seeing how Squarespace offers excellent customer support (so I’ve heard) and offers the non-technical page creation environment. In the end, I decided against going through with my Squarespace subscription and waved goodbye to the beautiful website I had created.

What caused me to change my mind? As I mentioned in Part 1, my roommate had also joined me in the website creation game and had chosen the CSS, HTMl, and JavaScript route. He showed me Bootstrap and I was instantly intrigued. Bootstrap offers the sleek templates that drew me to Squarespace but also has an infinitely customizable and mutable code. Whereas, I began to feel the limits of Squarespace in the final days of my trial. I could not get the CSS injections to work properly and often found myself wishing I could just peek at the source code.

I have taken the idea of a personal website as a rite of passage into the universe that is Computer Science rather than the personal promotion platform that was my first priority in Part 1. So far I’ve just been replacing bits of code from the “clean blog” template from startbootstrap.com. However, I have a vision for the website that will require some serious CSS and JavaScript. Hoping to have some time/motivation to learn the basics this summer. Also, I plan to get some professional photos later this summer to add to the website. I do not currently have very many quality photos of myself.

As a student of Berea College, I am required to attend seven convocations per semester. Convocations are typically like hour-long TED Talk-ish lectures or musical presentations. I’ve decided to give a commentary of all the convocations I attend in the form of blog posts on my website. I’ll be providing a summary along with a critique of the convocation. Convocations will not resume at my college until the fall semester so don’t expect any posts until August 2015. I’ve also thought of using my website as a marketplace for selling whatever side projects I have a surplus of (e.x. hand turned wood pens, 3d printed nick-nacks, laser cut plaques) as well as a file hosting service for any programming projects I am releasing.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the personal website so far and hope that at least my mom reads these blog posts if no one else.