Well clearly given the title it is my birthday today, go me!.

No cake for me but I did have a really good burger and milkshake.

The real question is why am I writing this on my birthday rather than having other fun. Well I think blogging is mostly a pretty selfish thing in my case. Sure there might be the chance that someone fins something useful here eventually but for the most part this is something I am doing for me and today seemed like a great day to do something for me.

In the past I have used Blogger from Google, Livejournal, hosted my own Wordpress, posted on Medium and likely a bunch more. Some of these are still live on the internet and some have been deleted, making them only slightly harder to find.

I would love to say using GitHub pages was my bright idea but as with most of the things I do I totally stole this from someone else. A friend balked at the suggestion I was going to write up what I had been working on last week on Medium and suggested I maybe should give this a try.

For the most part the setup is simple enough, GitHub had a nice setup guide which almost got me there. I had to dust off my Bundler knowledge and I got it all right on my third attempt. First time I missed the github.io from the repo name and the second time I tried to use the latest version of Jekyll rather than just pull in the github-pages gem which then specifies all of the dependencies. To say this is not really something for non-techical users is an understatement. If you want to just focus on your content Medium really is likely the best option for you.

However that is what I am currently enjoying about this, it is in a git repo so easy to keep backups as I can just push to somewhere else as well as GitHub and I can edit the posts in what ever editor I am playing with today or my old default which I am using right now, vim.

Setting up DNS made me go and fix my own DNS management system which had been broken since I moved to Ireland, yet another one of my occasionally loved personal projects.

Hopefully soon more interesting posts will be here but for now I am going to leave the creation timestamp as the lie that it is after watching the Irish election leaders debate far too late in the evening and go and get some sleep so I can have more family fun than playing with GitHub pages.

Peace, love and happiness.