I’m going to tell you the process and technologie I checked for making this website.

Requirements / Needs

My goals for this website are simple:

  • Recreate my old website in a cleaner way.
  • Test out a technologie stack that could also work for my business website.

My needs are also simple:

  • Display text and links
  • Display Images, which is something that was first done in 1992.

When you search for web hosting, you find out that most of them comes with Wordpress. Wordpress in a content management system (CMS), it manages stuff. You have tones of forms to build a website with it. I always stayed far from that because i’m a programmer, I know how to code. But as you get wiser, you stop reinventing the wheel and start using stuff that exists and works.

So I start setting up wordpress on my computer. But because I like pain, I also do it in Docker, a technologie that looks nice, that I wanted to learn one day. The process : install docker, set-up stuff, tutorials, videos, reinstall, move, kill process and lot of time. I finally got to wordpress and played with it. As a programmer, and someone who likes to do stuff efficiently, I was having anxiety! NEXT!

Stacks

My next step was to check how the cool kid does it these days? I used to do php with basic html/css/javascript (jquery) in 2010. Time changed! There is an uncountable amount of technology. I got lost in the search for the perfect simple answer. At one point I found a video that explained exactly my feeling : How to OVER Engineer a Website // What is a Tech Stack?.

I love to over-engineer (see my advent of code stuff). But for this website, I wanted to enough-engineer.

Hosting

I asked around for hosting platforms, and found out about Github Pages. Personal project free static website hosting, THAT’S MY NEEDS! They suggest using Jekyll to build your webpages, ok let’s check it out. Make a docker container for Jykell, works a bit but some stuff doesn’t work. I get sick of not working on DOING the website, I install ruby directly on my computer. BANG, I’m doing pages, you copy and change some layout and template, then the pages are all in a simple md format, super clean and fast!

My enough-engineer Tech Stack

I finally found something that’s to my requirements!

  1. Set-up a ruby + Jekyll work environment.
  2. Get bootstrap for css and create a style that I like.
  3. Create layout templates.
  4. For any content, I just need to create a markdown (.md) file that is really simple to write.

Jekyll will make a _site directory that is all the magic compiled in simple html. Easy to transfer to any hosting platform!