I am going to make a website, a blog website.
I have been learning web development on my own for about a year and want to see a project through from start to finish. I always loved writing as a kid and a blog site appeared simple enough. It will be a place to collect my thoughts and hopefully help someone else along the way. Since I am starting a blog, why not write about the process? I am fairly new to development, so this is a great way for me to document my development as a developer(say that five times fast). I will then put this series on the site as its first set of archives.I’ll walk you through the tools I am using, why I made the decisions I did and how they affect the final product.
So what’s important for a blog site?
Easy to update, fast to load and has a well organized content filing system that’s searchable. After looking at different site architectures I decided to construct the site using a JAM (javascript, apis and markup) stack with a SSG or static site generator. For this I chose 11ty, a node package installed locally in my working directory. Each article will be a markdown file that will be rendered as its own html page. For more information on what an SSG is and why I chose 11ty stay tuned for the next installment of this series.
Now let's talk about hosting because websites need a place to live too.
There are lots of hosting services out there, you can also host in house if you’re savvy enough. For a simple blog site I’m going with a hosting service. I have chosen Netlify for my project. I have chosen them for a few reasons. First of all, a great free tier. It is important to me that this series remains as accessible as possible. Netlify also offers continuous deployment from a github repo making this one a no brainer.
Which leads me to the use of git and github for version control.
They are well documented, widely used and they integrate well with each other as well as netlify. While not necessary github plays an integral role in how the hosting service and updating will work for this project specifically. It is a best practice to use version control for any type of serious development.
That wraps up the basics
Why I am doing this and how I plan to do it. See you next time when we talk in depth about static site generators.
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