Blog 4.0

I’ve started a few blogs/personal websites in the past. They’ve always been something I’ve home brewed.

My First Try

My first attempt was a personal site in PHP ridden with the classic PHP vulnerabilities. I even rolled my own “crypto”! I went all out with it. I created a CMS style admin panel and even created a mailing list. What a nice and fun time it was, not worrying about SQL injections or setting up SSL.

Try Two

My second attempt I decided I should show off my great javascript ability and UX expertise /s. I made a terminal emulator with the classic “Matrix” green. I can’t imagine pointing a recruiter to that site. It was also very prescriptive in the available commands, so if you weren’t a fan of “less” then you had no hope of reading what I had to say.

Static is good

From there I decided I should remove the fancy UI and go with something more minimal. I spun up my THIRD custom built website. This one was “static” but relied on a json file of blog data to dynamically populate blog posts. Although it was functional, it lacked any real feel and I was afraid to touch it.

This attempt

I finally decided I was done rolling my own. So here I am, using Jekyll. It was a much larger pain to setup than I had expected (blog post to come). I think that, although the overhead setup seems to have been about the same amount as previous sites, the final outcome has left me with a pretty easy to modify blog and landing page.

And more?

Hopefully I stay happy with my setup but with all the cool tools and toys, how can I resist changing my setup again? Because these posts will be in markdown, they’ll be easier to migrate compared to earlier iterations so hopefully even if I do move I’ve future proofed a little better than before.

Future Blogs

So here’s to Blog 4.0! Hopefully you’ll find something fun to read and I’ll find something fun to write.