Blogging once a year will not cut it so lets fix that. Sharing how I built this site and why!
It's been almost a year since I set this site up and blogging once a year is a sad state of affairs in the grand scheme of things so it's time to fix that.
I set it up using Microsoft technologies ASP.NET MVC 4.8 but I do that all day long at my day job so I re-built with someting completely new!
I heard about this Jamstack Thingy & it's pretty cool so after a TON of research at https://jamstack.org/generators, I re-built this site using a very promising technology called Eleventy / 11ty.
Let me tell you that Eleventy / 11ty is like magic!!! For just putting up a website quickly and without a lot of fuss & muss ... It's freaking GOLD my friend! Check IT OUT!!!
My name is Rick Graner (LinkedIn) aka rickthehat (twitch), @maverism, @rickgraner and I've been a web developer for 20+ years (1994) so I've seen it all using Microsoft technologies from Classic ASP to the latest .NET Core.
I also decided to step away from Visual Studio and learn something new so I'm going with Visual Studio Code. Ha, yeah, don't laugh, it's the same company but VS Code is different. It's lighter, faster, cleaner and for building out a Jamstack site using Eleventy / 11ty, it's actually perfect.
There's no better time than the present so I want to make it happen now, tomorrow and the next day. I want to see if building in public helps keep me on task. I will share how I built this and share all the issues I run into as I keep it up to date i.e. adding new features and maintenance using a Jamstack site.
I decided to host this site at Netlify. Since this is the company that coined the phrase back in 2016, might as well start with them. Compared to my day job, the way I deploy via Netlify is amazing and eye opening. I wish my day job had it this good.
... in a nutshell, when I commit this blog post to GitHub, Netlify will notice that and then build my site automatically (and boom goes the dynamite)!!! My site will then sit out at over 20 places all over the world so if you're in Alaska, you will download my site from the closest server. WHOA! Nice!!!
I learn best by DOING so if I can build something with the Jamstack so can you! There are a lot of good articles out there about the Jamstack but there's always room for more since so many people learn all sorts of different ways. Follow me on my journey to help flesh out what this site turns out to be while using an awesome tool like Eleventy / 11ty.
