<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="en-GB"><generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="4.4.1">Jekyll</generator><link href="https://dan.ie/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" /><link href="https://dan.ie/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" hreflang="en-GB" /><updated>2025-07-24T14:23:00+01:00</updated><id>https://dan.ie/feed.xml</id><title type="html">Dan Hayden - Software Engineer and builder of things.</title><subtitle>Personal blog and portfolio.</subtitle><author><name>Dan Hayden</name><email>dan@dan.ie</email></author><entry><title type="html">Exploring Cross-chain Communication</title><link href="https://dan.ie/exploring-cross-chain-communication/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Exploring Cross-chain Communication" /><published>2024-10-13T03:45:47+01:00</published><updated>2024-10-13T03:45:47+01:00</updated><id>https://dan.ie/exploring-cross-chain-communication</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://dan.ie/exploring-cross-chain-communication/"><![CDATA[]]></content><author><name>Dan Hayden</name><email>dan@dan.ie</email></author><category term="cross-chain communication" /><category term="web3" /><category term="blockchain" /><category term="evm" /><category term="layer 2" /><category term="layer 1" /><category term="interoperability" /><summary type="html"><![CDATA[How and why this site was born.]]></summary></entry><entry><title type="html">How &amp;amp; why this site was born</title><link href="https://dan.ie/how-&-why-this-site-was-born/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="How &amp;amp; why this site was born" /><published>2024-10-12T03:45:47+01:00</published><updated>2024-10-12T03:45:47+01:00</updated><id>https://dan.ie/how-&amp;-why-this-site-was-born</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://dan.ie/how-&amp;-why-this-site-was-born/"><![CDATA[<p>My previous portfolio website was built back in 2016. The website was built from the ground up using PHP, HTML, and CSS. The design for the previous website was created from scratch using Photoshop. For a while now i’ve been threating to update my portfolio website to utilise modern technology such as static site generation (SSG) and serverless web hosting. I wanted a website that was simple, clean, fast and easy to maintain. For the new website I also wanted to include the functionality for blogs that can be written in <a href="https://www.markdownguide.org/">Markdown</a> for easy writing and publishing of research and thoughts.</p>

<p>After some static site generation research I decided to go with <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>, an open source static sites generator written in <a href="https://www.ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a>, and leveraging <a href="https://github.com/piharpi/klise">klisé</a>, a simple Jekyll theme. Jekyll is a static site generator that is written in Ruby and is very flexible and easy to customise. I’ve built SSG websites in the past with Gatsby however I felt that Jekyll would be a better fit for this project due to its blog functionality.</p>

<p>The site is hosted on <a href="https://vercel.com/">Vercel</a>. I chose Vercel because it’s a modern serverless platform that is easy to setup and has a one click web hosting option that just works.</p>]]></content><author><name>Dan Hayden</name><email>dan@dan.ie</email></author><category term="static site generation" /><category term="vercel" /><category term="jekyll" /><category term="markdown" /><category term="ruby" /><summary type="html"><![CDATA[How and why this site was born.]]></summary></entry></feed>