my new and improved personal website

My old website

So I was in the need for a personal website overhaul. My old website worked fine and all, and it functioned as expected. However I built it almost entirely myself (and you could tell!). I built the site off Next.js and integrated this on the web development platform Netlify. It worked well for my first foray into web development, and it was beginner friendly in terms of compiling and deploying my code to GihHub automatically. Once I was happy with my changes, all I needed to do was to push my code from VS code using the GitHub remote repositories function.

Using Netlify for this basically left me to focus on the the design of the website itself, and the content. However, this intense ‘DIY’ approach of doing things prevented me further developing the site, due to the increases in complexity when I looking to add functionality. For example: adding a dark mode button took me around 80+ lines of code and around 12 hours of figuring things out, to do.

I did learn a lot from creating this site, in this state, but given it’s simplicity and difficulty of updating - I have grown out of using it for now. If you would like to see it for yourself, I have it hosted on Netlify’s own infrstracuture, and it is available here.

As you can see, my old site was very rudimentary. However, it served it’s purpose pretty well. I was able to pick up the basics of HTML again after taking a hiatus from it, since learning it in high school. I learned how to effectively use css to theme a website from scratch and I learnt the basics of Next.js.

My new website

I’ve built this website off the back of Jekyll, upon recommendations from my current manager, who has his own site. I decided to use a modified version of the Al-Folio theme, as this theme met my needs for a simple, easy to use website.

Not only does creating my website in this new way reduce the amount of backend work I have to do to keep my website functioning, it allows me to focus 98 to 99% of my attention on this site, on producing the content itself. This is always a good thing in my eyes, as my day job is starting to get more and more demanding.

I started by watching some YouTube videos about creating this, and I found this video the most helpful.

This new method of using Jekyll for my website is much better than using Netlify. This is because before, I felt encouraged to push every change I made to the code no matter how small, or big the change. With the use of Jekyll, you are almost forced to develop locally before pushing. I know that the process of developing locally and pushing once all changes have been made in this way is recommended with the use of Netlify - but I fell into bad habits developing with Netlify, in waiting for the build process to fail to indicate whether I have pushed bad code.