How it's Made

23 Nov 2019 - David Conmy

I built this site using the following tools:

• Jekyll
• Bootstrap
• Gulp
• Node

My intention was to build a static website to host my resume along with posts on subjects that I care about. I wanted this to also be the landing page of my personal domain.

The static-ness of the website was important to me. I didn’t want my website to rely on many external services. I especially did not want to have to host these services myself.

In the past, I have used Wordpress for building and serving my website. This has had a number of advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• Reliable
• Themable
• Customizable
• Well supported
• Supports Blogging

Disadvantages

• Rather robust for my actual needs
• Required a database for content management
• Self hosting will usually infer a cost for resources used

Then, I came across Jekyll.

Jekyll is a simple static-web-page generator that would allow me to create content in markdown and turn that content in to web pages. It also supports Liquid, HTML and CSS so I could create a website that was styled and responsive. It seemed like it is an ideal candidate for the job. It is blog-aware, so I would not be compromising on my ability to write posts to the website (which I thought would be inevitable if I was trying to stay away from hosting a database of some kind)

On top of all this, it is supported by github-pages - so technically, I could host the website from there for free and link it with my domain AND my github account.

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