For a pretty long time, my personal website at İstanbul Technical University had become my attachment point with the rest of the web. Later, it is followed by GitHub and Twitter accounts. And then in the race of trying to keep up with the internet evolution, I started writing in Blogspot. All that being said, from the very beginning I (ironically) always wanted to have a single entry point to the content originating by me. This blog post marks my first attempt in this pursuit.

The startling point was Blogspot, oh yeah. First I started to type HTML by hand. Then it led to me find a JavaScript library to syntax highlight the code I share. Finally, I found myself trying to escape HTML characters within the shared code snippets. At some point I decided to use Gists. Later a reader complaint pointed out that shared Gists were not properly displayed on mobile browsers.

After some research, I met with nanoc. A tiny static site generator written in Ruby. I have never used Ruby before but it didn’t take long for me to built this website in a couple of days. Thanks to the excellent documentation and the active community of nanoc. I might talk more about the obstacles that I experience during the transition, but to be honest none of the friction was due to the nanoc. (The words of Bob Ross describes this best: “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents”.) Instead, I invite you to check the code by yourself. I hope it helps other nanoc users out there.