I have wanted to redesign my website for a while now. In fact, I have wanted to redesign my website ever since I saw Nathan Wentworth’s website. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. To this day it remains my favourite personal website on the internet.
The past few weeks I have been putting off updating my personal website, which has sat untouched since October 2019. I’ve done quite a lot of interesting work since 2019, so finally this past weekend, I forced myself to sit down, clone the repository, and update it.
My personal website is nothing fancy; just a static website built with Hugo and a community theme, and hosted on S3. This should be simple, right?
Static generated blogs have seen a surge in popularity over the past few years, as a more cost effective and scalable alternative to traditional publishing platforms such as WordPress. A big reason contributing to why it took me so long to actually start writing online was uncertainty about the publishing medium I should use.
Ghost appealed to me for a while, but it felt like overkill for what I wanted to achieve. Most of the latter half of 2016 was spent diving into the ever-expanding React ecosystem, and it was during one of those dives that I was first exposed to the idea of static generated blogs by Gatsby, a static site generator which is built on the React component model. I am definitely a proponent of React. I have used it extensively in both personal projects and professional projects that have provided my income stream for most of the past six months. However, it didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that Gatsby too, was overkill for what I was looking to achieve.