Transforming the SensTech Website

I’m constantly trying to improve the presentation on this website of my technical materials dealing with lake levels and associated environmental topics of Deep Creek Lake. Currently (may 2018) it is mostly my thoughts and analyses about the conditions that should be addressed during the renewal negotiations of Brookfield’s operating permit for the Deep Creek Hydroelectric Plant issued by MDE. I’m conducting this work independently from any organization in Garrett County. All of this is my work.

This is just a brief update on how I structured this website. First it has been moved from senstech.com, which I’m now going to use for blog posts about any topic. Secondly, I’ve gone to a different static website generator, namely Hugo, instead of Jekyll which I used on senstech.com. Thirdly, I hope to fill in some of the missing pieces in some of the notes and make sure that everything is referenced properly.

In the remainder of this post I talk about what I did before the latest change. My new version (April 2018) is based on the Hugo static website generator.. I used Jekyll until now, but it became slow in generating and updating my website because of the number of pages, figures and references. So I looked for other options, and found a number, but after carefull consideration I settled on Hugo. It didn’t take me too long to convert my existing setup and here is the result. I hope you like ithe new setup. I’ll continue to look for better templates, or modify the existing, whichever is easier. I would like to include the “Disqus” commenting system, but that costs money. I’m not maintaining a webpage or other social media system because it takes too much to maintain. I’ll stick with my websites and email notifications.

The following description is about prior to April 2018.

For some time I’ve been searching for a suitable website format to present the work I’ve done over the years on issues affecting the well-being and health of Deep Creek Lake, MD. I’m not a web designer, so I’ve been looking at simple ways, like a blog format, to update the website with new and old articles. So I’ve been looking for a nice-looking, simple blog template.

Wordpress has a lot of templates, both free and at moderate and expensive costs. But that means I have to learn Wordpress and the intricate variables that one needs to use to tweak a template. Most templates are designed for people that make websites on a regular basis, which I don’t. I looked at hundreds of templates, but none that I thought would do the job without a lot of work.

Then I came across Jekyll, back in 2015, a way to make fast loading static websites..
I liked that approach because it’s ‘hands-on.’ Unfortunately, the available templates are generally of poor quality, at least to me, and did not do what I wanted to do which is basically a simple ordering of my articles and associated keywords by date and from which I could generate a list of articles by keyword, and with a nice look-and-feel.

I kind of liked Jekyll because I could understand how things got done, but again, I’m not a web designer, and so I’m looking for a template. I’m a ’numbers’ guy and an adapter, rather than a creator, of technologies. With websites I can implement stuff by making relatively small changes to html, css, php and JavaScript. I recently came across an article that stated that Jekyll was still used extensively for the preparation of static websites, static in the sense that one does not need a database to search through and pages are served to you as they are, without going through another transformation process. This is one of my constraints, namely, that I don’t need a database. I decided to give it another try, the third time in the last two years. I went looking for a template again, and voila, here is one a very eloquently designed blog template, Carte Noir, the one you’re looking at., at least from my perspective.

I commended the author of this template, Jacob Tomlinson, for an excellent product. It was easily seen from the code that there was a lot of attention put in to the details. One can find Carte Noir here.

I made a few changes to the template to suit my particular desires and needs. I made the text a bit smaller, took out the social media stuff, at least for now, made an “About” page and added a bunch of posts. The post “Weather Forecasts” demonstrates most of the features I wanted to use.

So here we go, as of today (12/22/2017), my senstech.com website is transformed into the new format. Checkout the blog post (“Weather Forecasts” of November 20, 2017, to see a demonstration of the wide range of capabilities.

I hope you like it. An email with comments, whether you like this format and content or not, is always appreciated.