Why did I need a 2.0 version of my website?

Posted on 01 Jan 2022 By Alex

Why did I change my website to Jekyll from Python/Django?

When I made the 1.0 version of my website, my goal was to stand up a website and get some hands-on experience with web development (a far different world than embedded software development). I learned a lot about HTML and CSS through Django and the development of my original website, but the original site had some limitations. The database backend in Django is incredibly powerful, but far more than my limited needs required. I also didn’t like writing posts in the browser. A Markdown preview plugin greatly enhanced the experience, but still lacked version history. The 1.0 version of my website largely went dormant after a few months.

My goal with this new site is to start writing more. I dove back into my website and realized that some simplification could help me, and that everything my site did previously could largely be recreated with a static site generator. After evaluating some options, I went with Jekyll. The new site is intentionally simpler then the old site, and with simplicity comes a lot of benefits:

• Posts are written in plaintext and stored in git
• Version history easily accessible as git repo
• Can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free

I also did some updates on the look of my site, including a dark theme to the site. Hopefully this gets me writing more!