Well now. It’s been a while. This site used to be hosted on a wordpress install on a shared hosting server. Then I let it sit for ages and did nothing with it while I got on with work. But I’ve wanted to bring it back to life and get my teeth into something a little more in line with my expertise, so it’s all moved.
It’s now a JAM Stack site, built via Hugo and running on Netlify.
Whatever the heck that means!?
Well JAM stack (https://jamstack.org/) is
- Javascript: interactivity on the site is all run client side in Javascript
- Api’s: for any server side processing, persistent storage, and so on
- Markup: Posts and content (like this one) are written in Markdown (simplified HTML) and then processed (or transpiled I guess).
Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) is a static site generator, which performs the last step in the JAM stack, the processing of the markdown into something more human readable. You don’t have to use Hugo, there are a myriad of different static site generators to use, the most popular being Jekyll, Hugo seems the second most popular choice and it’s a lot faster. So Hugo it was.
Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/) is where it’s all hosted. Actually it’s hosted in a couple of different places, as a git repository (on github and my development machines) and as a compiled site on Netlify. But as the finished site is plain html it could be hosted on anything lightweight, a Raspberry PI even would work fine.
But, I’m going with Netlify because cloud, and it’s free and I get to play with AWS functions as well and various other goodies they provide. So, that’s it really. It’ll be a chance for me to learn a bit more css (getting to grips with flexbox) and markdown and templating in general.