Start Date: April 9
End Date: April 10
Blog Post
I’m trying not to be too bitter about the last project. As a distraction, let’s do a CSS-oriented one next.
This is a proof-of-concept, programmer’s blog made using the Jekyll static site generator. Despite this being my first time using it, Jekyll is nothing if not user-friendly, and it did 99% of what I wanted out of the box, leaving most of my time free to write the custom CSS. Beyond that, I didn’t dive too deeply into the system beyond basic functionality, but the documentation suggests that extending it further wouldn’t have taken more than a few lines of code if I’d needed to.
I was also quite happy with how quickly I was able to create a functional website. If I needed an SSG for something outside of this month, I’d still probably favor Gatsby.js, but setting up a Gatsby project can feel kind of weighty with all of the React and GraphQL. Here, I was able to get up to speed in 10 minutes. If development time was an issue, (and I knew which plugins to use for deployment,) I could see myself considering Jekyll.
So, that was fun. #5 is going to be another non-trivial application. Here goes nothing.
Remarks
Out of the month's eight completed projects, this blog's design is probably the most solid. This is most likely because of the project brief itself - unlike some of the more ambitious designs, I expressly set out to design something that might belong to a professional coder. A few of my bad CSS habits are still on display here, and these negatively impact the implementation, but the more conservative design choices help to mask them.
It might be worth noting that, until a few days after I shipped this project, I hadn't actually heard about 11ty static site generator, which is effectively a more flexible Jekyll with some additional features. It might have been more useful to compare Jekyll to that instead of Gatsby. I did end up trying 11ty later on during the month, for Project #8...but we'll cover that on its own page.