We just got a new puppy! The picture shows me holding our new baby while our elder one Bigby, the cat, is being introduced to him. Layton is a Labador Terrier mix. He’s only 3 months old and was just rescued from Taiwan this weekend! He was about to be sent to a foster home before we picked him up. We named him Layton after Professor Layton from Nintendo DS. Hopefully you’re as smart as him Layton!

Webby turned out to be very addicting… It’s certainly as powerful as I imagined, with lots of room to play with. However, I haven’t used ruby in a while, so it’s time to remember the syntax of ruby. I also learned to use partials in my layout, so i can further separate content and layout. This is progressing along fairly nicely…

I have just setup the main frame of the site, and added a little personal touch to it so at least people know who’s site this is. There is still plenty of work to be done, but I’ll take it one step at a time, and slowly migrate all the content from my previous site here. But I think this is enough to deploy.

I’m also trying to be more efficient when I’m deploying the site, so I’m trying out git + webby. I am going to keep all my source code and output folder in github, then just do a repository clone on the server. To update I just need to pull updates from github on my server, and it’s done! So far so good.

Is there a scalable way to create websites with only static pages? I don’t want to continuously be adding html pages, or editing html pages…

The answer is Yes! I’ve began experimenting with static web site generators (currently using Webby), and my new site will be the results of this experimentation. I hope for the following when I’m experimenting with Webby:

• Separation of content and layout
• To use newer markup languages (textile, markdown, haml … )
• All static pages when website is deployed
• Easy to add content (or else i never will…), preferably a blog like structure

It seems Webby has it all. So it’s time to dive in and see what I can do with it!

Yup, as the title said, today I passed my qualifying exam for my Ph.D studies at Berkeley! Now all that’s left is the thesis and thesis defense!! (like those are easy tasks… -_-)