This is part of a much bigger remit of mine to get on top of my personal sites. I'll be writing more about this as the year progresses I'm sure, but this is really my big focus for this year after reflecting on last year and that's to spend more time on my own projects.
Needless to say the blog has had a refresh. It's not 100% complete, but then if I strived to get things 100% done I would never launch anything ever.
What did you do Ruth?
Well the main shift was away from Middleman and on to Metalsmith. I'd been choosing Metalsmith as a static site generator for a while now, since I left my last permanent role I wasn't tied to a Ruby stack so much anymore. Don't get me wrong, I have no qualms with Ruby, it's totally cool. But I'm a client side developer, so if I can use JavaScript for something I'm going to, it helps me learn more JavaScript and that helps me be a better client side developer.
How did you set it up?
Well I didn't want to spend all the time setting it up if I'm honest. I've made some peace with myself recently which is not to start absolutely everything from scratch. I'm a nightmare for it sometimes. I make that choice for learning, but it takes me longer and right now I want to be building more things.
So I spoke to Marcus, who already had his Metalsmith powered blog all up and running. He kindly just said his was open on GitHub so if I wanted to fork his code I could. And I did. And it was great. All the infrastructure was there and all it took was a little configuring, high five for blog posts in markdown... I had something resembling my data and not his up and running in an evening.
There was still a whole heap to do, I edited all the markup, styling and config to suit my needs. I wanted a fresh look which took a while. But I don't regret my life choices. Marcus is a great JavaScript developer and I learnt a bunch just sifting through his code.
Eighty percent done
Like I mentioned this isn't complete and there's a few tasks still remaining, but if I strive for 100% with all my personal work I won't release it. So here it is. Feedback is always welcome 🤓