Recently, I decided that it was time for me to create my own website to post and talk about my interests. As a programmer, sometimes I like to read blogs about whats happening in the world, and sometimes blogs also contain some good information. I thought it was time for me to have my own website, and thus I started development of my website.

Choosing the technologies

For my second internship, the big project I worked on with another intern was a new website for the company we interned at. The company was using WordPress, managed by another small company, and we decided that WordPress was too bloated, too slow and therefor we had decided to create a new website.

For the website at the internship, after testing Astro and Next.js, we decided that Next.js was the better choice. In all honesty, I didn't test Astro correctly and had a little rough time with setting it up. Now that the website for the internship is done, it is sometimes hard to maintain the website, and it can still be slow at times. For the Content Management System, we already had chosen Strapi, a headless CMS that gives you data that can be converted into components and other types of information. Although it worked great, there were some minimal limitations so I decided that for my own website it would be a smart idea to at least look for other solutions for my own website.

After reading into some things, and also being online of course, I found out that the CEO of the company Vercel, who created and maintain Next.js, is a fan and supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu. Therefor, after experimenting with Astro and finding how great and simple it is, the choice to pick Astro for my own website was easy.

The CMS was more difficult to choose. There are a lot of options for headless CMS out there, all different in what they can do, and how they are built. As I wanted to be able to self host the CMS, the best choices were Strapi and Directus. When I was making a choice, I found that Directus was a good pick for the website, but Strapi was also a smart idea. Eventually I just decided upon Directus as there were more options to customize things.

As a developer, I should try to know a couple of technologies, and while I do, I had never worked with a client side frameworks besides React.js. Now for this website, I thought it seemed smart to try a new client side solution. The website does not use a lot of client side interactivity (as of writing, only the navigation menu at the top of the website), but trying something new seemed appropriate. Now I've never used Vue.js or Angular, but Svelte seemed like the most interesting solution. You can just write basic JavaScript/TypeScript and you'd still have no issue whatsoever with different syntax.

With the help of some great libraries and packages, as well as "Astro Integrations" which are simple add-ons for Astro that either give you a component to add the website or that changes the website in one way or another. In my case I don't use a lot of Astro Integrations, I use things like Highlight.js and Markdown-it.

Building the website

My initial plan was to only make the blog posts and projects "dynamic", where the other pages were programmed each time and if those had to be changed, I'd go into the code and deploy the site again. After starting with the development, I had decided that doing it like I had done at my internship was the smarter move: make building blocks, and build them into a house for each page of the website.

The CMS is quite fast, I run it on a VPS and the delay for each request is actually pretty good after using the in-memory database Redis on the background, where the requests and their responses are cached. This way, the delay on my local machine is only about 70-150ms per request. Although the website is more than fast enough, the smart idea seemed to build the website. As of right now, I rebuild the website manually or when something is changed.

Trying to keep this website as simple as possible was quite easy. It still needs to look respectable, and I tried to do that with this website. Jeff Geerling has a really simple website, but I wanted mine to have a bit more content and a less 2000s look. Simple but somewhat modern. Now I'm no web designer but I think I did a pretty decent job with this. There will be a lot of things coming up on the website in terms of content and new building blocks, but having a simple yet semi-modern design is my main goal for this website.

What will I do with this website?

For now, I will mainly talk about technology and updates in the world of technology in my blog posts, as well as other things like things I've been finding out while developing through experimentation (and a lot of trial and error).

As I also do a lot of photography, but that will be on a different website I am developing right now. This website will be a lot like this website but with less programming and more photos. On that website, I will also post photography blogs about experimentations, techniques and events I have been to as a photographer.