hello

Who am I, what is this for, why does this site look this way?

• Hello, I’m always working on some kind of computer-related project. Usually I hear about some new thing, and try to implement it, and learn how to do it along the way. It fills a constant need for both creativity and learning.
• When I’m learning and launching something new to me, something almost always goes wrong along the way. Typically, missing or incomplete documentation results in searching and searching and piecing together info found across sites until I end up with a working config. To help reduce the time it takes for others to find this info in the future, or to document it for myself in case I need to rebuild a system, I wanted to have a place to explain the problems and solutions I’ve found.
• I recently really started liking the solarized color scheme - both light and dark. It is very easy on the eyes due to being low-contrast and there’s a well thought-out version of it created by Ethan Schoonover that I planned to put into a custom theme in WordPress. I was also looking for a very readable font to go along with it and found a theme using Computer Modern which apparently is the font created by Donald Knuth for TeX.

It turned out that theming WordPress was harder than I wanted to do, because it wouldn’t let me change the fonts very easily with their new “extremely customizable” theme.json system. So I started looking for other blog content management systems, ideally with ability to do syntax highlighting for code and I found this post where the author listed GitHub Pages, Jekyll, WordPress, and a few others that didn’t meet his needs - he ultimately selected WordPress, but I was tired with it so I started looking into Jekyll because I had never heard of it. THe GitHub Pages + Jekyll version seemed neat since I already use git. This led to a whole learning curve around Jekyll and Ruby Gems that I’ll document in another post.

Finally, why the weird title Project Review Letters? Well, when I was an undergrad doing research in Physics, we often looked up papers in journals like Physical Review Letters and the document processor LaTeX is also used to format research papers. I feel like my notes here are results of research on my projects, so the title fit.