For various reasons, I decided to recreate my personal website. Although not lacking features, the old website was fairly ugly and used a very cobbled-together custom template approached that proved difficult to make many changes to.
Regarding looks, I have aimed for a more minimalistic approach this time around that hopefully isn’t too displeasing to look at. I haven’t included a screenshot of the old site, but I can assure you that it was an eyesore.
The key behind the new site is Jekyll. This is a system from one of the creators of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner. I have included a brief description of Jekyll, taken directly from its own documentation:
Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server.
The great part about a static site is the performance is great! Also, you have less security concerns because your site isn’t being dynamically generated based on potentially flawed logic that somebody wrote. That being said, one of my pages relied quite heavily on PHP and I don’t currently have a quick solution for this. The crux at the moment is my dynamic home IP address; but I think I can solve this whole issue with something similar to DynDNS.
Another great feature of Jekyll is that it is designed to be blog friendly! Blogging is something fairly new to me as historically I had either not been interested or was too inconvenienced by my previous site design. I’ll be honest, I’m not planning on churning out blog posts at any great rate. I just think it is nice that I now have the option to easily publish articles.
Thanks for reading!
- Michael