I'm looking to spin up a new personal website, after leaving my current one languishing for 5 years without an update. I built that one mainly to facilitate my transition from WordPress development to modern SPA engineering, but it's kind of onerous to update since it's not backed by a CMS, and the codebase is... well, it's a first-attempt SPA built by a WordPress dev. :)
The new one will serve a similar purpose (I'm looking to transition into gamedev), but the challenges are a little different this time around — all of my work over the past five years has been on internal or otherwise not publicly available software, so I can't really show a thumbnail collage of my recent projects. All of my personal, gamedev-related projects are in various states of unreleased or unfinished WIP, and they're all individual features or systems intended to slot into a bigger project that doesn't exist yet, so I also can't really throw any playable demos up on itch.io or whatever.
So I'm thinking that the best way to showcase my knowledge/skillset this time around would be with a blog, where I can talk about some of the nascent projects I've been working on, the challenges I've encountered and how I'm approaching them, etc.
However, it's been a long time since I've published an actual website, so to get started I'm trying to get acquainted with what the ecosystem looks like for this sort of thing in 2023. All of my domains are currently at Google, so I'm thinking about giving SquareSpace a try (since they've recently purchased Google Domains).
The pros for SquareSpace, as I see it currently:
- Pretty painless initial setup (besides agonizing over which template to use)
- Some flexibility to grow into it and customize to my needs over time, though I haven't deeply investigated this yet
- Zero time spent thinking about hosting or server-side whatever
The big con:
- Totally closed-source, walled-garden type of ecosystem, so if I wanted to migrate eventually I would need to mostly start over from scratch.
I'm tempted to spin up something fully custom, so I can choose my own tech stack from top to bottom. But the major downside of that is that I would need to spin up something fully custom and decide on a tech stack from top to bottom. As fun as that sounds, I kind of doubt it would be the most valuable use of my time right now. It would also force me to think about things like hosting and server configuration which I have no enthusiasm for. I'd really like to get something off the ground within the next few days, so I can start writing content this week.
Any recommendations? Options I haven't considered? Good or bad experiences to share? Any success/horror stories about SquareSpace in particular?
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this at all (I don't have a blog either).
Have you considered using static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, Gridsome, Pelican, etc.)? Both Gitlab and Github support custom domains? I suppose you can set up a pipeline (Github Action) to convert and publish your markdown files into the blog. You don't need to think about hosting at all. And you have all of your content in plain text files in a Git repository.
That's definitely an option that's on the table! But it comes with more questions, like:
I would kind of like to support comments as well, but for that it might be better to just post the blog links to Lemmy and link to the corresponding Lemmy thread at the end of the post.
I think if you can achieve what you want with HTML, CSS and JavaScript by yourself, any static site generator will allow you to do it. They just automate filling in HTML templates, which you can create yourself too.
I know Hugo. It's simple and, as I mentioned, I do by myself what I don't find out there.