I love static websites. And that love has only grown over time. I started my career building dynamic websites with database backends and those are great, but they require a lot more mental energy to build and secure. Static website, on the other hand, require very little effort and are very resilient to being attacked. So this article explains how I build static websites these days. It may not be what you use and that’s fine, we can both celebrate our differences. ...
As you can probably tell, the site has been redesigned for 2020. It has been 7 years since I made the initial design and I felt it was time for it to be refreshed, as well as provide a better experience for readers on mobile devices. I used Bulma for the CSS framework and VueJS for interactivity. I really like working with Bulma, I find it has a more simple grammar than Bootstrap and is more tweakable as well. The elements and components that can be made aren’t as feature-rich as Bootstrap, but overall I find that I don’t need them for what I do. I used Bulma first on my resume and since that was a breeze, I have started using it on other projects as well. But I held off on using it on this website as the original design wasn’t my best work, so I had to first bush-whack through bad Sass and HTML. Thankfully, ripping out Bootstrap and replacing it with Bulma was so easy that I got it done in 4 hours. ...
I am in the process of consolidating a number of websites that I use into a smaller set of servers. This is partly being done to reduce costs as well as support less resources, but it also provides me with a chance to try out new things. In particular, I wanted to test out a load balanced architecture that will work within any VPS environment. Before I begin provisioning “real” servers and having companies bill me, I wanted to test that my ideal architecture works. I’m using the word “real” here to denote servers that will be public-facing and acting in a production-like capacity, as well as incurring billing charges. ...