It has been a while since the last time I tried to build my own website or a personal blog, I used to stop halfway either because it was taking more time than expected or because the priority changed meanwhile. I ended up having some deprecated private repositories that I need to clean now ^^!.

I believe my mistake (if we can consider it as a mistake) was that I wanted to do many things in parallel, like building my website and learning new tools and languages at the same time.

Also, it comes that I am very unlucky when it comes to planning my holidays, in particular with the current COVID-19 pandemic and the country lockdown. But let’s focus on the positive aspect of the situation, now I have some free time which means no excuses.

CMS vs Flat CMS vs SSG

As I said earlier, it is not my first attempt to create a personal website/blog, even if I worked mainly on mobile native platforms during the last years, I had the opportunity to work on web projects as well.

The following are my previous attempts to create my own website:

I was very happy with Grav and as you can see from the list above, it was my first experience using flat cms. Actually, I managed to build an internal learning hub for my previous company using this tool but I couldn’t explore more than that.

So my first reflex was to try again Grav to build my personal blog, sadly, I noticed that the community didn’t grow since last time I used it and the number of themes remains almost the same.

The people behind are still active and I encourage them to keep going on that way, Grav is a great product, but because of the lack of adoption there was no suitable theme for me and there was no chance for me to integrate my own template. So I started looking for alternatives then I found Hugo and Jekyll (and another one using React but I am not a fan of React).

Jekyll choice

Hugo is based on Go language while Jekyll is based on Ruby. Themes and plugins are almost similar and their communities are big. I am still hesitating between both of them, even if for the moment I am using Jekyll, and to be honest, if I didn’t discover Ruby with my current company I would not choose Jekyll.

I will give Jekyll a try and see how it will evolve in the future. But for the moment I am happy to have finally a blog live even if I am missing Grav admin dashboard.

Disclaimer: I spent less than 30 min to write this first post, it is more like a test than a well-prepared article ;).