How I Created This Website

Last updated: 2020-08-05

How I created this website

I use Hexo as a static site generator and host for free via GitHub Pages. You can view the source code here.

I went with Hexo for the fast build times (sorry Jekyll) and because my familiarity with Node.js and npm. If I want to switch technologies later, it’ll be easy since all the articles here are generated from Markdown files from my laptop.

Alternatives I considered:

Here’s my thought process for choosing among the myriad of technologies available to create a personal website. There are website builders, content management systems (CMS), or you can code your website yourself. I chose to code my website myself (with the help of Hexo) for the fun/challenge/flexibility.

Static Site Generator (SSG)

Chances are you don’t write your notes in HTML (and you shouldn’t). Instead of writing your articles in HTML, you can write them in Markdown (a more human-readable format) and use a SSG to “compile” your markdown down to the HTML your browser understands. StaticGen is a useful website to compare among static site generators. Here are SSGs I considered:

• Jekyll
  • GitHub pages default. Requires Ruby. Very popular and huge community, but slow build time.
• Hugo
  • Fast build time. Written in Go. You don’t need to know Go if you use a pre-made theme, but I wanted the flexibility of designing my own theme.
• 11ty
  • Simple. Also written JavaScript. But it’s newer and doesn’t have as huge community behind it just yet.
• Gatsby
  • React.js is too much overhead for this simple website. Also, I’m a beginner with React.js.
• Pelican.
  • Written in Python. Cool, I know a bit of Python myself. Maybe worth checking out later.

Content Management System (CMS)

If you want something quick and easy, CMS is for you. No coding necessary. I haven’t looked much into using a CMS myself, but here are a few options I thought about:

• WordPress
  • The most popular option. Google search reveals “In 2020, over 455 million websites use WordPress.com. That means that the WordPress market share is 35% of all websites in the world!”
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Magento
• Ghost
  • An open source headless Node.js CMS. To be honest, I’m not sure what a “headless CMS” is at the moment, but maybe I’ll look into it later.