My new website

Recently, I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. For years, davidcrandall.com has been used for a number of things: showcasing my photgraphy, my website portfolio, my graphic design, my music, etc.

At one point, the website was a static html website generated with jekyll.rb - but jekyll was slow and integrating with other frameworks was kind of a pain. Special workarounds were needed if you wanted to have anything written in {{ curly brackets }}

Then, for years, I had been on Wordpress. And I really enjoyed that.

Wordpress was easy to update, there were loads of free plugins that did all kinds of cool stuff, and I could get a website up and running in minutes if I didn't care about customizing anything. But...I DO care about customizing things. And if you've ever developed a premium wordpress theme, you know it is extremely tedious balancing PHP, CSS, and the wordpress Codex when trying to develop anything scalable.

Not to mention the myriad security vulnerabilities I had to worry about, database backups, and all this overhead that comes with maintaining a wordpress site. It took all the fun out of working on my website.

SO, I decided to rebuild the entire damn thing using technologies I love and use every day: JavaScript, ES6, VueJS, Express, CI/CD pipelines, etc.

How it works

First, there's the app itself, which is a simple nuxt app with some key differences.

1. A 'posts' directory, containing markdown files of blog posts (including this one!)
2. A 'manifest' function that creates JSON from the markdown data
3. Dynamically generated routes from the manifest in the nuxt.config.js file, so blog posts generate static html files on npm run build
4. Githooks and Github Actions to test and deploy my work to s3

At the end of the day, I can write a blog post, commit it to my master brach and it'll be live in a matter of minutes.

I'll share more later with a tutorial/steps on how it all works.

For now, check out the gitub repo