I think by this point the overall pipeline and site code are pretty solid, so I wanted to go over those.
Site
The site itself looks rather basic and modern as you may have noticed. This is mostly because I wanted a site that was easy on the eyes and focused on content, unlike the new trend of flooding a site with ads, banners, and pop-ups.
Foundation
When I was on the hunt for a CMS there were plenty of options. WordPress in particular has a large presence in the blogging community. However, I am a developer and I want to get my hands dirty and look at some code. After a little bit of digging around, I found Jekyll and the seemingly hidden community around it.
The primary upside of Jekyll is the sheer amount of customization that is available. Even though I started off with the Amplify template, I was able to make some adjustments to the page and make it my own. Despite having picked this template, there is nothing stopping me from getting some other template and swapping everything out with little effort. The actual content on the site is just make of Markdown files that Jekyll complies into a finished site based off the templates.
The other nice part about Jekyll is that I am not stuck to using a particular editor or website to do my writing, in fact I have been using WebStorm to write my posts to far, because I like the interface. Plus, there is no way to undersell the benefits of using git to track changes and manage my workflow. I would imagine using git for editors would be awesome if that was something I was interested in.
AMP
Something that is probably not apparent to most readers is the sheer speed at which the pages load, because everyone expects that pages be fast and responsive. I chose Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) because the sole purpose is being fast and lightweight. There are a few controversies surrounding AMP, but the general reasoning given is not enough to dissuade me from using it. Plus, it was not much effort on my part to set it up and does not impose limitations for me.
Disqus
Yet another service I use with some issues from the community and other bloggers. Although, a lot of the concerns are avoidable if you know a little about how iframes work and like to dig deep into settings to disable creepy stuff. By default the Disqus ads are turned off because this site is small enough to be ads-optional for free. I did have to disable their referral link injection and tracking “features”, which were hidden in the site settings, but at least they can be turned off. Considering that the service is offered free of charge, I decided it is the best option for me at this point. I might switch to Utterances at some point, but Disqus is one of the largest comment platforms.
RSS
If the previous two items are a cause of concern, there is a handy-dandy RSS feed for you to use and just read the posts. The feed is not going to go anywhere, so feel free to use it exclusively if you are concerned about me or the services I use on the site are doing something shady. I also have no interest to sell ads or track you, so all the posts will be included in their entirety in the feed so you never need to come back to the main site. I personally use Feedly to read some news articles at the recommendation of a friend for certain outlets.
Hosting
For the hosting, I use Github Pages and Cloudflare together. While I do not strictly need to use Cloudflare, they have been doing a good job recently and will have AMP Real URL to package up the site according to the AMP Signed Exchanges. Meanwhile, Github Pages is necessary as they kindly go ahead and compile the site to be served and host it free of charge.
Transparency
If you still want to see the actual nuts and bolts of the site, either out of curiosity or to make sure I’m being honest, you can access it anytime on my Github. If you are too lazy to even do that and know some stuff about web dev, go ahead and open up the developer tools in your browser and have a look.