It was time for a change

My old website was… old. It was time for a change, and an easier way to keep it updated. I’m not much of a blogger. I prefer writing longer contents, like books or documentation (when I have to). But, I decided it was time to start doing it yet again.

Nowadays it seems that most things you need to do A, B or C are already invented, offered for a price or found open source with a bit of work and elbow greese. I do not expect to draw millions of people to this website, but I’d like a place where I could place my opinions and rant here and there while in between projects. So, I put myself to work and built this website in a weekend of so with Astro and the FrontMatter CMS. All this integrates well with my workflow, so why not?

I wanted to spend as little as possible on this, so for those of you that may be interested in the technology used:

• A DigitalOcean Droplet, with nginx, LetsEncrypt, and static content
• Astro build as the site generator, with a few plugins for searches and an external service for the contact form.
• A few components using Vue 3, the rest using Astro components.
• Articles written in MD/MDX using the FrontMatter CMS as a plugin of Visual Studio Code
• Gitlab to host the code privately.
• Some NodeJS to automate a few things in the publishing space.

Save for a few things, almost all of the components to make a website, keep track of the code, and publish it are under very permissive licenses, open source and/or free.

Excellent.