Resources Powering This Site

Over the course of this domain, it has been powered by WordPress, made up of homebrewed PHP scripts, and redirecting to other social media accounts of mine.

I've heard a lot about static site generators, and there are many of them out there. So I decided to take one for a spin to see if it helps me keep the site looking modern, up-to-date, and running with minimal overhead. Don't know what a static site generator site? Basically it lets you have bunch of content, put it all in a consistent theme, and then renders a bunch of basic HTML, Javascript & CSS files that are easy for any web server to host with the added benefit of massive scaling while having no server-side security risks.

The first one I used was Harp and Semantic UI. They were decent, but there was room for improvement (namely Harp's aging dependency tree & Semantic's community fragmenting).

For the Summer 2019 refresh, I'm moving to Eleventy and haven't yet selected the CSS framework. I've also ditched AMP because it wasn't worth the effort.

The Components

• Eleventy - This is a fantastic Node.js framework that continues to grow in popularity
• GitHub - Which hosts all the raw files that makes up the static generator

How It Works

1. Using git (either from the command line or on GitHub.com), I make a change to one of the files on the site
2. GitHub Webhooks inform my web server that there is a change to the site
3. Upon hearing there is a change to the site, my server downloads the newest version of the codebase from GitHub
4. The site runs npm run build to convert the source into static HTML
5. The output is stored in a directory on the webserver, and nginx keeps serving those files without there ever being any downtime

This formula gives me the flexibility of making updates from my phone, using GitHub's mobile applications, and having most of my content in easy-to-read Markdown.