Making This Site

Published on: 2020-08-29

I had a good play with raw bootstrap based static sites, using Jinja. I played around with Jekyll in the first iteration of the site which I liked: I thought might be nice to learn Ruby off the back of that. But in reality these "nice" ideas always end up being more work than they're worth. To be honest I really like using Python, I don't need any more barriers to putting something. I don't like blogging, or self promotion or anything like that, so barriers are easily constructed if you're not careful.

As a result, I'm using Lektor, it's a nice, Python based file based CMS which is totally extensible. That's easy, flexible and functional enough not to produce any barriers.

I've munged in a bit of bootstrap and jquery around the sides, as I don't do aesthetics. I have looked at NPM and the like for resource management but I am not doing anything fancy enough to bother at present (this may well change!)

Again, too many barriers. I'm keeping it simple. Thankfully we live in a world where one doesn't have to pour hours into determining if something will work across browsers. In fact having to do that 10, 20, 25 years ago is probably what put me off web development and design.

It was mind-numbingly boring in the old days. As it is I might never end up updating the site, but we'll see... In this age of lockdown, putting yourself out there on the internet is not a bad thing, especially considering I was very much a tech-for-engineering, face-to-face socialising type of animal before all this.

I salute the W3C and framework builders around the world, you've finally made putting together a website easy enough that the most stubborn backend/infrastructure programmer will put one together.

Anyway, this is a working base, but I'll make some new parts to this post to cover what I do with lektor to:

• Tag blog posts
• Integrate with my github so I can blog about stuff I genuinely like doing
• Really get under the hood of Lektor to add richer content and automation (e.g. Flows, Data Bags and Image Operations are all interesting and deserve some blogging about I think)
• Blog about some of the things I actually do day to day
• Make the styling a bit less gross!

Next post in this series...