This Website
Idea
I nicked the idea off a friend in September 2022, I recommend checking out his site when you’re done here!
Development
This site (while it has been live throughout development in various stages of completion) was officialy launched on 1st July 2024. This would naturally lead to the question “Why did it take such a long time to get from idea to execution?” The easy answer is life got in the way, I did a gap year where I worked 2 paid part time jobs and 2 voluntary part time jobs, but the more interesting answer is that I initially tried to use Jekyll.
This was not only because my friend had, but because GitHub Pages is powered by Jekyll. However, I found after several hours of trial and error that it was going to be quite difficult to do. For starters, the generation was done using ruby scripts (which at the time I had no knowledge of), the whole thing relied on knowledge of markdown for the pages (which again, younger me had no idea about), and it would only build on linux systems which meant I had to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to build it. I did manage to VScode to access the WSL filesystem in the end, so I could’ve build the site using Jekyll.
So the project sat for a year, just existing as a GitHub repository. Then I began university and learned many things in the process. At the end of my first year I had the skills and knowledge to use markdown (although not ruby just yet), and because I had just finished a module in web development, I also had new JavaScript, HTML, CSS and NodeJS knowledge. As I was looking around at different static site generators, I came across Astro which was built on Node and seemed to be relatively straightforward to implement.
I began development shortly after finishing my exams, and finished the initial site after 2 months of working on it on and off.
Links
Click here to see the GitHub repository