There have been so many posts about the tools currently available to help publish personal websites. As a designer-developer, it’s been so hard settling on one.
You see, as a designer, you like something visual, where you’re able to tweak colours, font sizes, and other properties without having to delve in # and $ signs. For a moment, Webflow seemed to be the way out. It’s a simple interface enough for you to turn designs into website code without having to bite your fingers. It's also secure, but there’s the restriction on the tooling. Webflow has also gotten pretty $$ recently.
Then Wordpress helps, because you can have builders like Elementor and Visual Composer to do the same thing as Webflow, but with more plugins, etc. But you open yourself up to lots of malicious hacks, etc.
So you decide to quit it all and go to Jekyll, your favourite static site generator. But soon enough, you realise, or remember, that it’s static, doesn’t have a lot of extensions, and you want something flexible because you want to make your site really personal. After all, it’s a personal website.
So I’ve come to Strapi. Finally? Maybe. I like Strapi because it’s CMS-based, which makes it easier to bundle content and its categories, it’s also API-restricted, so I’m able to manage access to the API at will. With a framework like Nuxt, I can easily componentize parts of the website, while extending capabilities through the JS package ecosystem. I also realised that this stack could work well for a few other projects I want to try. Also, the admin dashboard for Strapi is extensive!
This means, I get to have a lot of control over what happens where, without having to do much. But the cons? I have to have two different services, one for the Strapi server, and the other for the Nuxt frontend, and having to update JS packages, etc. Oh, the days of pure HTML.
In all, I’m glad I could get better at Vue working on the website, and then I’m able to flexibly design and code my website at will.
I really hope this is my last shot at publishing a personal website. Am I excited? Maybe. 🤔
Update
2024-02-19 Republished the frontend for this with SvelteKit. Upgrading from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3 broke the site. I'm sure I was doing something wrong. Anyway. While working on a new project and trying Sveltekit on that project, I thought to rebuild the frontend for this website in that, so I did. I've known about Svelte since 2017, at least. Glad to be able to try it out now. I just miss having the actual names of the routes as the file names, instead of creating folders with to many plus signs. But it's aight!