It has happened many times before, and this sure ain't going to be the last time. I've jumped off the WordPress ship and over to the headless CMS ship.

If you're curious about the other times I've changed my website platform, here you go:

..and many more since the late 90s that I don't have any record of, sadly.

This time I've abandoned the WordPress ship, which was great, in favour of the hypermodern headless CMS ship. To be more concise, my website is now built using Prismic.io and Next.js. It's hosted on Vercel.

I spend at least half of my time developing React applications. Being able to do the same with my own website, and client websites for that matter, suits me perfectly. The combination of any headless CMS (there are many great ones, and I'd really like to try Sanity.io), Next.js and Vercel is truly a great developer experience.

There are also some limitations. Some are specific to Prismic.io and some are more general. So far I've been able to work around most of them without too much hassle.

There you have it. Rest assure there will be a new post of this kind at some point.

Until then, I hope you enjoy my new website.

PS: You can use Cmd+K or Win+K to open the search palette which gives you easy access to all the content on this website.

Oops, I did it again...

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

My very first post on this blog, posted back in 2014, explained why I moved my website from WordPress to Jekyll. Now I'm switching again.

Here are the reasons why I did that move more than six years ago:

I wanted to use my favorite editor when writing.

I wanted to store my homepage source in a Git repository or in Dropbox.

While many of these reasons still holds true, I’ve now moved my personal website back to a WordPress installation. Here are the reasons why:

I will be working more with WordPress in the future, and I’d like to learn as much about is as possible. Having my own personal website run WordPress is probably the best way to learn, since I can do what I want with it.

WordPress makes it simple to manage my website while on the go using my mobile phone.

I like to change things up a bit every now and then.

The Gutenberg editor makes it much more enjoyable to use WordPress.

I’m sure there are Markdown plugins that lets me write my posts using Markdown, but that’s not really important to me right now. If I later want to go back to using Markdown or a static site generator, I can always export my posts using one of the Markdown export plugins.

This website is hosted on a small droplet at Digital Ocean and it’s using a custom theme that I’ve made using components from Tailwind UI.

I plan on extending the theme with a better footer, a comments section and more. I’ll probably add some custom block types that integrates with third parties, and I plan on posting photos on the website.

I find joy in doing these things, and I learn about WordPress while doing it. That’s reason enough for me.

Going WordPress again

My website was previously built using Jekyll and hosted on Netlify. Because of various problems I’ve had with my Jekyll setup, I decided to go for another static site generator: Hugo.

I have been very happy with Netlify. Easy to deploy, integration with Github repos and automatic SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt – all for free! Despite all this, I wanted to become more familiar with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and all their products, so I changed my setup so that this site is now hosted in an S3 bucket and distributed using Cloudfront.

So far I’m very happy with the new setup. Hugo is lightning fast and easy to configure. I’ve created a simple bash script that automates the process of building the site, deploying it to S3 and invalidating the Cloudfront cache.

New website platform

My personal homepage has been powered by Wordpress for several years. This will now change.

Update 2018-02-09: The information in this post is no longer current. Please read this post for information about my current setup.

My personal homepage has been powered by WordPress for several years. There’s nothing wrong with WordPress, it’s a mature blogging platform with a plethora of plugins and themes to choose from. Nevertheless, lately I’ve been wanting to use a static site generator for my personal homepage. Here are some of the reasons why:

I want to use my favorite editor when writing

I can easily store my homepage source in a Git repository or in Dropbox

Now, most of these things can also be accomplished using WordPress, but I find the concept of using a static site generator quite interesting, so I’ve decided to give it a go.

I ended up with Jekyll. It’s a static site generator written in Ruby, and it seems to be very flexible and quite easy to configure and use. My homepage is now hosted as a Github Page, which means that all of the contents are stored in a public Git repository.

Come back later to learn more about my experience with using Jekyll, as I’ll try to post useful articles about how I’m using it.

Going static

Occasionally I write something. It'll end up here.