Hello World - Launch of xtal.sh

Apologies for the generic and overused “hello world” greeting (I just had to). xtal.sh is finally live! 🎉

This is my very first blog post on this site. In the near future, I plan on posting various guides and lengthy rambling about things that interest me. This site will also act as my main “hub” for my projects and apps.

The technical specs #

This website is powered by Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator. This is actually the first time using Jekyll, and even though I don’t really like working with Ruby, Jekyll requires very minimal to no coding whatsoever, which is really nice.

As of this writing, the site is currently hosted on DigitalOcean’s* App Platform. I’ve fiddled with Heroku, Netlify and AWS before, but I’ve been a long-time DO user, so it just seemed like the simplest choice. We’ll see how it performs in the long run. :3

* Yes, that’s a referral link. I’m not sponsored by them, but if you sign up with the link, you’ll get $100 in credit, and I get $25, so it’s a win-win!

This website also uses umami for anonymous analytics. It’s self hosted, and I much prefer this over Google Analytics, as I’m not interested in violating individual people’s privacy. Only thing I’m interested in is seeing which projects and pages perform well, and the overall stats of the website itself. However, if you prefer to not have the analytics script running, enable DNT on your browser, or block analytics.xtal.sh on your network, and the script will be entirely bypassed. ✨