My site is finally live. After years of procrastinating putting up a web presence (even though I'm a web developer), I finally got around to publishing a website.
console.log('Hello world!');Naturally, my first post will be to tell you what I did...
A history of tries
In my perfect world, I would put my 10+ years of Drupal experience to work, build a perfect DevOps pipeline, and push directly to production on a Kubernetes cluster running on a cost-effective AWS/GCP/Azure infrastructure. I've always been a bit cost conscience... I've considered trying to roll your own server with EC2 instances, or the $5/mo. Amazon LightSail option. But the combination of the cost, and being overly-complicated, these factors always kept me from really pursuing this option.
I've been using Github Pages for quite a few years now, taking advantage of publishing static (small) websites for free on the Github platform. The idea of using GH pages to host davidpagini.com has been a passing thought for years, I just wanted to be sure it was scalable. I've explored Jekyll and javascript libraries, but never found something I was convinced would be successful, until...
Dance with the one who brought you
As previously mentioned, Drupal was always going to be a bit overkill for a simple site like this. It offers amazing content management, a library of pre-built functionality (modules), accessibility and responsiveness handled for you, and plenty more features. But then I learned about a module called Tome, which allows a user to build their site in Drupal, and then export it to a static site, which could be easily hosted directly on Github.com.
For the last piece of my puzzle, I was in search of a fast and lightweight local environment, which would essentially function as "production" for me, that could be simply plugged into a DevOps pipeline, likely to be Github Actions. I was hearing increasingly more about Lando, growing every year in popularity, and we just decided to adopt the tool at work. I've had the pleasure of working with Mike (@pirog) and Alec (@reynoldsalec) from the Lando team, and finally gave the tool a try.
So I'm going with Drupal, Tome, Lando, Github, and a suite of other tools to bring this site to life. I intend on writing about this journey further in the near future, but so far I'm very pleased with ease of standing up a site I can be proud of...