New website

January 18, 2021

So, after a few years of my website being down because of my free OpenShift container expiring, I finally got to getting it back up as a long weekend project.

I took this opportunity to rethink my approach and try something different.

The main maintenance problem with two of my previous website incarnations was that they were based on a database-backed CMS (KeystoneJS + MongoDB; previously Drupal + MySQL) and their dependency on a separate data store proved to greatly limit my hosting and stack choices.

After some reflection, I concluded that I wasn’t really taking advantage of any features that necessitate a data store - neither comments under posts, nor user forums, nor user registration.

For all practical purposes, I’d be better served by plain old static content.

But I am a lazy person, and I don’t want to handcraft too much HTML and CSS, and I don’t want to manually copy common navigation elements between static HTML pages.

Having some dynamic fireworks available wouldn’t hurt as well.

It turns out that there are frameworks that serve my use case well, and the most popular at the moment seems to be Gatsby.js, based on React.

Gatsby works pretty well as a static site generator and can support dynamic React content through the process known as rehydration.

I could use this to support things like e.g. dynamically calculating years elapsed since the last job change on my resume (which, BTW, is a topic for another blog post).

Anyway, if you can read this, the new tech seems to be working well and, hopefully, I’ll be reporting more about it in later blog posts!