You may have noticed that the EightAByte Industries website has changed a bit. That change goes deeper than just the superficial look and feel that you see in your browser.
Prior to the New Year (2022), the EightAByte Industries website ran on WordPress. As the CMS market leader, it made sense to use WordPress when I first set up EightAByte. It allowed me to quickly put a website, easily manage content, and easily (for the most part) change the look and feel. However, as the years have come and gone, WordPress and the various plugins I used kept having issues. Security flaws, compatibility conflicts, upgrade path blockages, etc. As a software developer, I had thought to write my own platform and convert the website over to it. Like a lot of things, that endeavor never got the attention needed to put it over the finish line.
Fast-forward to this past New Year's weekend and the final straw fell. MySQL (not a fan to begin with) failed and requird a completely uninstall, reinstall, and restore of data. Too much hassle for a small personal website. So I spent all day on New Year's writing what you see today. It is a dynamic website that works off Markdown pages with some YAML to handle content. The main code that handles the web request and content rendering is ~80 lines. The Jinja templates that handle the presentation layer total about 200 lines. There is also about 50 lines of JavaScript and the largest portion of the site is the CSS coming in at 11,000 lines (I did not write this, thank God).
I then front the webcode with NginX and Certbot. I manage the website by maintaining the code and the content in a Git repo. The server has a cron job that pulls down the latest version from the repo on the hour. The whole thing is pretty automated. I just have to write markdown pages and push to the repo.
I need to give credit to those whose work upon which I based a lot of the webesite...
- The Bootstrap theme I am using (and the massive CSS that goes with it) is the work of StartBootstrap. The Clean Blog code allowed me to not worry to much with design. I retrofitted to work with my Jinja requirements and "melted" it down to a single base page that the other templates extend. I can also fairly easily replace everything if I need to change the look and feel in the future. If you need Bootstrap themes, StartBootstrap is a good place to start.
- The header graphic is not the one included with the original StartBootstrap Clean Blog theme. It was provided by Ian Dooley. His Unsplash account does a good job of displaying his talent. He is for hire. I highly recommend him.
- Finally, the website code is largely based upon the work of James Harding. Obviously, I had to exptrapolate his beginnings out to fit what I needed to do, but kudos to him for pointing me in the right direction.