July 20, 2019 1 min to read

My Blog Site is Live!

Time for a brief introduction.

I thought it was time the internet had another tech related blog so I’ll be posting write ups of my web development and other tech projects here in case they are of interest to other people.

The first item on the agenda is choosing a platform, there are many viable options ranging from a custom site built from scratch through to a platform with no technical knowledge required such as Medium.

Medium has been a juggernaut in this space for a number of years now but it seems like the values of the platform and its creators are beginning to diverge. A search for “Why I’m Leaving Medium” yields a lot of results if you are interested in the details of this shifting sentiment.

Dev.to stands out as a great alternative, they have built some solid functionality and an amazing community of developers contributing high quality content. In my opinion dev.to is the obvious choice in this situation but I’ve been curious to try Jekyll for a while now, so Jekyll it is.

Building a site with Jekyll can be as simple as choosing a theme then writing each blog post as a mark-down file. From these files Jekyll’s build process generates static site content in the form of plain HTML, CSS and JS, there is no database involved as there is with platforms like WordPress. With a simple CI/CD pipeline in place publishing a new blog post is a matter editing mark-down then pushing changes to source control. The build pipeline takes care of running Jekyll’s build process and pushing changes to your server of choice. The end result is light weight, easily cached and great for SEO. This approach is well suited to blog sites which are read often but updated infrequently.

My experience so far has been positive but I will cover Jekyll in more detail in a future post once I’ve had the chance to put it through it’s paces. There are a few other topics I want to cover before then which should serve as a good test.

Stay tuned.