Welcome to the World Wide Web! heh. Recently, I find myself talking with my inner-self (no I'm not going mental) and recalling things I want but couldn't. Must be signs of aging. That said, I decided to make my own website so I can write things I want to remember; publicly lul. And maybe it's time to have one since I've been a developer for 7 years and I can't even include something on my résumé (I had a wordpress site tho HAHA).
Don't know why I had to explain myself there. Anyways, Wordpress has been a popular content management system (CMS) for a long time but I didn't really want to make a custom theme in PHP so I decided to look for a NodeJS alternative. I ended up using Ghost which is very minimal and I find it really simple to setup. It also uses handlebars which has a nice syntax hehe.
Albert Henk van Urkalberthenk.com
Then for the past 3 weeks, I allotted 1-2 hours every night to making the custom theme. It was a nightmare because I am not a frontend guy and I suck at design. However, since Ghost CMS is open source, there's a lot of free themes available to be used as inspiration. I probably looked into around 10 source codes (yes let's make that bold and italicized) because I'm a "best practice" freak and I want to make my project structure as maintainable as possible.
Currently, this site runs in an EC2 instance (free of course - #TeamFreebies here). I did use Amazon Simple Email Service for the mail stuffs and Let's Encrypt for the SSL certificate. I'm planning to move it to an ECS stack as an experiment but not now as I'm probably the only one visiting this site at the moment, heh.
It was a fun experience, setting up something from scratch. It served as a refresher as well for my CSS and HTML skill, and some bits of frontend javascript.