My First Post
For many years, I have used WordPress to quickly set up sites. I wanted to try something new(er) and lightweight. So here we are.
Sometime around 2005, I discovered this new thing for creating websites. It allowed you to create pages without having to write the code each time. That thing is called WordPress. WordPress is a very nice tool. Sometimes one tool is better than another. After working with Webpack for a few years now, I decided to start building something that would use templates to generate a site for me. This way I wouldn’t need to setup a database. It would be efficient, lightweight, and fast. After a day or two of experimenting with different templates, landing on Handlebars. I got my webpack.config.js solid, and setup my file structure.
Now that I was moving in a good direction, I took a step back to try and streamline things. For every page I added, I had to update webpack.config.js so it would load the page. It also took some variables for the page. I knew this was not sustainable. At that moment, I had a realization that someone probably made something like this that I can build off of. As you may have guessed, I ended up discovering many people have created many tools like this. They are called static site generators and they have been around for quite some time. Over the years of making money doing WordPress plugins, themes, and sites, I had passed up on some of these other great tools.
Fast forward a little bit. I have tested quite a few static site generators and found a few I liked. But what I was after is something super quick to setup that would use very basic files and with very little code getting in the way of the writing process. I ended up on Jekyll. And here we are nearing the end of my first post with it. Right now this is my second site with it!
At this time, the goal of these posts is to leave notes for myself in the future. They are being posted on the internet because someone else may find them useful. If I am writing them down, I may as well make them public. This post is mostly for myself. Maybe I’ll remember the journey of learning something new. Maybe it will trigger a memory of what was going on right now. Who knows? If you’ve made it this far, thanks for coming along.