So, About this New Site...

I have seen the traffic figures of my little website, so I know you haven’t noticed that the site you are on is new. Trust me, it is. Allow me to take you through a little tour of it, and give you a rundown of why I rebuilt it and what I plan to do with it.

The ‘Why’

Since I first acquired this domain while taking an HTML course in the late 2000’s, there have been several iterations of this site. Most were basic little HTML affairs not worth talking about. However, a few years ago I got the urge to turn it into an actual blog. This required something a bit more substantial.

My only real experience with blogs was with Wordpress and Joomla, two platforms that I don’t care much for. So, rather than go with one of those two trusted, well-known platforms I went in search of the obscure! Browsing cPanel’s integrated installers, I found Modx. A brief Google looked promising, so I hit the install button and let cPanel do its thing.

Looking back on it, I wish I hadn’t. Modx is a confusing mess, and updates are an enormous pain. After getting it setup and writing a couple of posts, I lost interest and let it rot. This, of course, is the last thing you should do with a complex CMS.

Cut to a couple of nights ago. I logged into my email to find twenty-some emails from my site’s contact form. Each had a bunch of code in the body; someone was trying to inject code to hack my site. Luckily, there was no sign that they were successful. I removed the contact form and decided it was time for a change.

The platform

This wasn’t the first time I had considered rebuilding the blog. I have always enjoyed writing, but knew that I did not want to put my content on a platform like Medium where I wouldn’t have control over it. However, I also did not want to deal with maintaining a monolithic CMS. What to do, then?

Recently, the subject of static site generators has become popular in the Linux community. Both Alan Pope and Joe Ressington have mentioned Hugo, which got me interested in the idea. Over the past several months I have checked out a variety of them without any real plan to use them, I was just poking around in them.

With a fire lit under my rear, I no longer had time to hem and haw over the wide variety of options. So, I chose the obvious: Hexo. My day job as a BigCommerce developer has me working with Node.js daily, and Hexo was already installed on my machine as it was one I had toyed with earlier. As my friend Kyle would say, “Add to cart!”

As for comments, I’ve brought over Disqus for now. I don’t love it given all the baggage it comes with, but Giscus (the new hot comment platform) seems a bit… hacky? They even say in their documentation that it may break with Github updates. And, given how companies have been destroying their APIs lately, I don’t trust that Giscus will be around for the long term. So, looking for another comment system may be on my to-do list going forward.

Design

In general, I was happy with the overall look I had achieved with my Modx theme and had no intention to stray too far from it. Indeed, the header of this site is virtually identical to what I had before. That said, the home page was a bit plain, showing only the title and opening lines of each blog post. At the very least, it needed some imagery.

In a previous iteration of the site, I had toyed with the idea of using old, black and white, royalty-free pictures. I enjoyed this idea, but abandoned it as I wasn’t a fan of the typical large banner images that are so often seen on blogs. One of my frequent sources of inspiration, Boagworld, presented a unique way of displaying a post image. By keeping it in a small circle off to the side, it doesn’t push content down or distract from the actual content. Sold!

Given that I had a specific end goal in mind, I didn’t bother to spend much time looking through the variety of themes available for Hexo. I chose Paperwhite, a very basic theme which I could easily customize into what I wanted. While my Modx theme was built using the Bootstrap framework, for this site I used CSS grid for the general layout and flexbox for a few of the details. I plan to write a more thorough post about this at some point.

I’ll mention also that I did want some sort of custom font. As I wanted to get this project done quickly, I didn’t evaulate a bunch of fonts. I had seen the recently-released IBM Plex font and liked it, so that’s what I chose. I don’t know yet if I’ll keep it around or switch it out.

Moving forward

Now that I have a good looking (imo, anyway) blog on a solid foundation, I do intend to start actually writing posts on a more regular basis. Maybe even weekly. This isn’t going to be a ‘resume’ site, and these posts aren’t going to be focused entirely on what I do for work. I will have some of those, of course, but this will be a place for any of my thoughts or experiences involving technology and computers to live, should I choose to voice them.