Why didn't you develop this site from scratch?
Oct 13, 2017 • JoA-MoS
Recently I have had a number of individuals ask me “Why are you not building your site from scratch?” I do have an answer to this but first lets talk about what I want to accomplish and what the options are to establish my thinking and how I made my decision.
Goals:
- Be my web presence
- Always up
- Free or near free to host
- Use my custom domain
- Easy to update / Deploy
- Easy to post
- Easy to customize
- A portal to get to my other projects
- A place to host my resume
Options:
- Custom Site
- Wordpress
- Drupal
- Other Blogging Engines
- Jekyll
The thought process
I have had some experience in hosting my website and a blog in the past. I have used blogengine.net a .NET based blogging engine, I have written a complete custom site, I dabbled with Wordpress and also Drupal. In my previous experience I ran into one of two issues:
- I couldn’t make the site do exactly what I wanted to do because of the limitations of the blogging engine or the difficulty in modifying the blogging engine to meet my needs.
- I spent too much time focussing on customizing the engine or the custom site and not on the content that I wanted to post to the site. No matter how perfect the site was I was always wanting to improve it, add a new feature, that’s just who I am.
Along came github pages and Jekyll which ends up being a completely free solution that allows me to easy customize and easy to host yet I can add additional pages that are completely unique and completely custom that do not follow the Jekyll format. In the end it just felt like Jekyll was the best of both custom and blogging engine. Which would allow me to focus on my projects and the content.