My personal website had been a bit neglected lately. It was looking dated, the performance wasn't great and it was quickly built from a stock Jekyll template. Not only that, it's been a few years since I last wrote anything!
I've been developing a lot with Middleman at my work and feel like I know it inside out. Being productive is important for my personal site so I can easily make changes but also make it completely customisable. I love the simplicity of static site generators (SSG) for websites like this and previously my site was built with Jekyll which is great for simple blog sites but I wanted to do more than write blogs with this rebuild. Therefore, choosing the power of Middleman was an easy choice for me.
I want to see how far I can push Middleman in terms of adding dynamic content and was concerned it could become a tangled mess of JavaScript given the projects I have in mind. However, I'm excited by the recent release of Hotwire and want to test the limits of what I can do with Turbo and Stimulus and figure out where the crossing point is before needing to switch to an all singing, all dancing JavaScript framework. However, if I'm ever going to use a JavaScript framework then I really like the look of SvelteKit.
Gone too is GitHub Pages, swapped out for Netlify. It's so easy to spin up sites on Netlify, it's very customisable and I have plans to use Lambda functions for additional functionality. Netlify Functions makes this incredibly easy to develop and test with which made Netlify very attractive.
Given how bad I've been at writing blog articles, I wanted to give myself a better writing environment in the hope that it would encourage me to create content more regularly. So, I'm currently writing this from Netlify CMS which has the added bonus of integrating well with my Git workflow in addition to Netlify Deploy Previews.
I was keen for a simple, minimal interface for the new site and after discovering Terminal CSS I knew I had a winner. It gives me an amazing base to start from and I've started making some small customisations which I will add to over time.
That's the first post in two years completed but there'll be lots more content coming soon so keep an eye out!