At Long Last, it's Live
Last year, I started an initiative to build my own website. With all the website builders and content management systems out there, I originally planned on using one of those. At the time, I already had a website on Wix.com that I’d built for school, but felt like it wasn’t quite… me. In fact, with all my experience with website builders, including Wix, Weebly, Webs (FreeWebs at the time), and WordPress (man, I never realized how many of them started with a W), they all felt very limiting. As a developer, I wanted power.
I originally started building my website using PHP, which was something I was already learning at the time. Outside of being a good learning experience, PHP was ridiculously easy too host. Without prior knowledge to hosting any sort of website, it was a pretty easy choice. In fact, when I purchased my domain last April from GoDaddy, it came with LAMP hosting.
While that started out okay, several months in, I ended up taking somewhat of a hiatus. And everything changed when I started getting more involved in Node JS. I mean, JavaScript on the backend? Heck yeah! On August 2016, having almost completed the entire website, I started rebuilding the whole thing using Node and Express. Here’s what’s running my server:
- Express for routing and running the server
- Mongoose for handling Database connections to MongoDB
- Pug View/Templating Engine
- Marked and Highlight JS for editing my blog
- Bower for managing front-end dependencies
- rollup.js and Babel for transpiling and bundling JavaScript
- GulpJS for compiling and bunding Sass.
By far, my proudest achievement on the site is my blog. In an effort to learn about database structures and dynamic routing, I decided to build the whole thing from scratch. At least when it comes to the schema and routing. In the front end, I’m using:
- jQuery for DOM manipulation
- Parsley for form validation
- TypeIt for… well, if you’re on a computer, look at the top.
Over the past few months, I’ve been making minor, mostly unnecessary adjustments. To be honest, they were mostly an excuse to keep hiding my work from the world. In fact, just recently, I’ve been considering redesigning the entire thing. But after over a year in development, I’ve finally convinced myself that it’s ready. Who knows; maybe I will be redoing the site before the year ends. But for now, I’m proud to have launched it today.
