A couple years ago I decided I should have a website. After all I'm a software developer, and software developers have websites. So I bought a domain...
It turns out that buying the domain was actually the easiest part. You see, the
gotcha for having a website is that most websites have stuff like HTML and
CSS maybe even JavaScript. And since I'm a software developer I can't just
have something as important as the source code of my personal website written
by someone else. Using libraries to build the site is fine of course, but
certainly any "microblog" framework would be going to far. The logic there
is very sound I assure you.
Anyway an eager, younger version of myself quickly threw some awesome content onto the website and called it a day.
Some months later I actually started generating the
site.
I'm a big fan of gulp (this is actually true despite any other sarcasm) to
manage any set of repeated tasks, and building a website turns out to be a set
of repeated tasks. So using gulp to render my HTML and CSS was a no-brainer.
And obviously I need to render this stuff; if I wrote actual HTML and CSS by
hand I'd look like a software developer from the stone age. And of course I
don't need any JavaScript on a static website, but it's the natural choice for
rendering all the other that goes onto the website.
I did need to write something though, so I settled on handlebars templates for
the markup and LESS for the styling. It turns out though that handlebars is
pretty limiting even for something as limited as my blog with no content. This
caused a quick switch to swig. Of course I also added markdown support so I
could write posts while staying even farther from HTML. I was pretty happy
with that, but after all that work there wasn't any time left to add awesome
content, just some average placeholder
content.
Which actually brings this little story to the present day, where I'm writing this. Because it's now been some months since I last did anything to the website and the content hadn't changed since I added the average placeholder content. But this time I actually managed to add some real content! This is the content! Awesome! A blog about writing a blog. Look at how meta I am.
Oh and of course I still had to change something. So now the posts are no
longer swig templates (because that project is no longer maintained), rather
this post was rendered with nunjucks templates! Since both projects are
basically jinja2 for JavaScript very little work was necessary, hooray!