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Code with Me - My New Website Design

2020-09-21 · Livestream or live hangout · Ali · recording, 2 h 22 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough

In a late-evening live stream Ali codes a new design into his Ghost website: he buys the Krabby theme, fights Git, Xcode and a full disk, tweaks typography and colours with viewers' help, and gets a custom home page working.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Opening the stream: VS Code, Ghost running locally, streams moving to Twitch

00:04:00 — Buying the Krabby theme; removing authors, sidebar items and sign-up buttons

00:24:49 — GitHub, a VS Code crash and Xcode; freeing disk space by deleting uploaded Deep Dive files

  • ★★ Trying the code editor VS Code for the first time, Ali gives up when it crashes and will not quit, and switches back to Sublime Text. — 00:32:09
  • ★★ Ali's 1 TB MacBook lacks the disk space to install Xcode, which he needs for Git, so he deletes old files. — 00:36:14 · MacBook
  • ★★ Having uploaded his Deep Dive recordings up to the one with August Bradley, Ali deletes the earlier files, including Tiago's, freeing nearly 30 GB. — 00:36:53 · Deep Dive, Tiago Forte

00:40:35 — Typography, featured posts, comments, colours and tweet embeds, with viewers' suggestions

  • ★★ Ali plans to ask Angus to think about the hierarchy and structure of the many tags on his website. — 00:42:49 · Angus, aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali learned to code at about 12, in a way he would not recommend, and points viewers to his website post on why and how to learn to code. — 00:58:12 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★ Asked about a mentorship programme for medical students and doctors who want to do something else, Ali says he does not really run one but invites suggestions by email. — 01:12:42
  • ★ Ali streams live on YouTube, Twitch and Twitter at once through Restream. — 01:14:54 · Twitch

01:30:04 — A custom home page through routes.yaml; WordPress, Squarespace and MacBook questions from the chat

  • ★★ Ali sets out to make a custom home page for his website. — 01:30:04 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ghost is free to use if you host it yourself; otherwise you pay for Ghost Pro hosting, which Ali uses for his website. — 01:33:21
  • ★★ Asked why he does not use WordPress, Ali says he hates it for being slow; to the suggestion that Squarespace is much easier, he says he is not about that Squarespace life. — 01:37:10 · Squarespace
  • ★ Ali does not want to hire someone to build his website because he finds the work quite fun. — 01:43:55
  • ★★ Asked whether to buy a MacBook or an iPad, Ali answers: buy a MacBook; you don't need an iPad. — 02:07:33 · MacBook, iPad
  • ★★ Without the sidebar Ali finds his new home page looks super empty, so he drops the minimalist look he was going for. — 02:08:48 · aliabdaal.com

02:15:27 — Music playing, Sunday Snippets at the top, sign-off and Twitch

  • ★★ Ali ends the session with his website looking all right for now; what remains is mostly restructuring it and making sure there are landing pages for everything. — 02:21:22 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali streams much more often on Twitch than on YouTube, at least as planned, so as not to clog his YouTube channel with random live streams. (hedged) — 02:21:58 · Twitch

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: aliabdaal.com · Ghost · Krabby

Also: People: Angus · August Bradley · Tiago Forte

Projects: Deep Dive

Organizations: Twitch

Products: iPad · MacBook · Squarespace · Sublime Text · Visual Studio Code · WordPress · Xcode

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