My personal website
This website has been a work in progress for as long as I can remember. Or, at least, for so long that I can't really remember exactly when I first started working on it.
My first experience "hosting" content on the web was in high school. For an English assignment, I had to write a reflective piece from the perspective of the protagonist in a book and utilise some form of multi-media. I decided to write the assignment as though it was a blog and created a website to hose this fictional character's blog. It was terrible. I didn't really know anything about HTML or CSS and used Macromedia Dreamweaver to build the site. I didn't know how to change the font of the web page, so I wrote the content in Microsoft paint and then screenshotted the paint files and embedded them into the page to get the look I wanted. It was 2001, and I was young, but I'm sure this web design sin will show up on my permanent record at the pearly gates!
This site itself has been through multiple incantations - none of which really had any longevity that resulted in this being a "permanent" website. The earliest version I can remember was built using an open source .NET blogging engine. I wrote one blog entry, which was a scathing review of the installation and first login experience for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I never updated it after that single entry (I also didn't really play SW:TOR much after that). I hosted the site using the free web hosting space offered by my ISP.
From there, I rebuilt the site using Bootstrap in 2014 (it was the hot thing to do at the time!) and ran the site using a Flask on Heroku (both Flask and Heroku were also hot at the time!)
In 2019 my team at work had started using Contentful and I thought it was pretty awesome! I rebuilt the site using Contentful as a content source and a React front-end using the react-static site generator. I also migrated from Heroku to Netlify to run the site as a totally static app.
The current iteration of this site, which I hope will be fairly permanent, is built using a custom static site renderer. I realised over time that I was falling into an anti-pattern of rewriting this site into a "new" technology over and over again. This time I've just got a Node.js build script that slurps up a bunch of Markdown files, and renders them with templates to an output directory.
I'm trying to minimise the use of complex third-party dependencies such as a CMS, CSS theme libraries, full blown frameworks like React & Vue or a complex static site generator. This is often the wrong approach in professional contexts, but good in this case because it minimises the need to constantly work on keeping this site up-to-date with the pace of change of the third party code.
I don't want to constantly need to spend time on this project making sure that is hasn't broken because of downstream changes or vulnerabilities.
The most complex dependencies in this project are handlebars as a template renderer, and marked as a markdown formatter. Both of these dependencies are quite mature and stable and unlikely to require massive changes in the future.
I haven't yet added any complex resource bundling to this site. I hope I won't need to, because I think something like webpack falls into the category of complex dependencies I want to avoid using. On the other hand, I certainly don't want to build my own resource bundler from scratch. Time will tell!
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