This website has gone through a lot of iterations with many different tech stacks as I learned web development over the years.
Here is a visual timeline of the landing page.
(V1) Github Pages Static HTML and CSS
Vanilla HTML and CSS.
(V2) Django Web Application
Now we’re getting more advanced! During this time, I was learning the ropes of web dev for the first time.
Using the Django framework hosted on Heroku when it was free with a Postgres database for my status updates. Django provided an admin page.
(V3) LAMP stack
I don’t know why, but I wanted to make a LAMP stack “from scratch”. Also deployed on Heroku. And I bought my domain name!
XAMPP as a development environment with its built-in Apache and MariaDB. After that, I tried hosting it on my own Linux machine, but switched to Heroku. (dev log that I kept)
(V4) Jekyll Site
Languages/Technologies
- Jekyll
- Github Pages
Features
- Using Jekyll templates instead of creating from scratch
- Jekyll blogging system
- Large of use of Markdown for writing (as of now)
- No backend or database
Development Process
The backend of the previous version was very insecure and inefficient. After multiple tweaks and fixes, it ended up like a static site that didn’t need a database at all. I wanted to use Jekyll’s “blog awareness” feature, clean file structure and easy workflow (at least compared to my LAMP stack), so I switched over. After a few hours of research and a full night of rewriting content, the site is up and hosting with Github Pages. Majority of the activity of my website lies in status updates, so to keep it I modified the LAMP stack to only be for status updates. As for blogging, it will be done on this site with Jekyll.
(V5) Jekyll Revamp
Features
- Frontend redesign
- Cleaner project structure (projects collection)
- Minimalistic, project focused
Development Process
The old version was very messy; I made it without any knowledge on how static site generators like Jekyll work. So I finally read up on the documentation and followed the step-by-step tutorial. I was unhappy with how messy the previous site design was as well, so I stripped it down to the main focus of my site which is to be hub for my projects. It now only has a list of the projects on the landing page and a simple about page.
(V6) Jekyll Blunder Years
I think I wanted something more simplistic-looking, and ended up with something not so pretty to look at…
(V7) Jekyll Glowup
(current version)
We’re so back.