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Jacob Baker
Jacob Baker

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What tech did you use to build your personal website/portfolio?

Over the festive period I'm planning to redo my personal website.

So, for a hit of inspiration, what tech did you use to build yours?

And feel free to shamelessly plug it if you answer!

Top comments (72)

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

I went with Gatsby since I wanted to mess around in React land. I also wrote it in TypeScript since I'm currently not using TypeScript at work. Here's the full list, iamdeveloper.com/thanks/

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drewtownchi profile image
Drew Town

The thanks page is really cool. I definitely should borrow that idea for myself.

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

Looking like that's the path I'm going to go down. Do enjoy a bit of TypeScript.

I do like the thanks page as well; might do something like that for mine.

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kaydacode profile image
Kim Arnett 

Wordpress. And I'm extremely not sorry.

When I first built my super simple site, I used PHP, and customized everything. I wanted to show off my skills I learned in college, etc etc.

I didn't follow the web developer track - I went into mobile. After doing so, I realized a few things about maintaining my website.

  1. Recruiters do not care what your website was built with. Even most managers couldn't care less.
  2. I needed something that maintained itself, because I no longer had time to maintain it every year (after getting hacked).
  3. Having a blog was a huge driving factor for me... I want perspective employers to be impressed with the content I'm creating, not focused on what version of JS I'm using.. or whatever web people look at now a days :P

Today my website is 100% blog. I'm hoping to add a store to sell some of the things I've designed. But Wordpress has made it a no-mess no-stress task for me, and completely meets my needs for now.

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workalicious_yo profile image
David Kaplan • Edited

That's awesome Kim! WordPress and PHP used to, maybe still do, get a sideways look sometimes but they are solid, aren't going anywhere and are solid. I'm trying to take my PHP scrappiness over to Laravel. You might check it out if you like WP.

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

No judgement here! My long-standing website is currently WordPress with a custom theme because it was the quickest & easiest thing for me to do at the time to get something out there with my name on it.

Your reasons are so on point.

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drewtownchi profile image
Drew Town

I used Gridsome because I really like the static site concept for a personal project and I like Vue. Additionally I used TailwindCSS for styling.

That's it... Hosted on netlify and done.

Drewtown.dev

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anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar

Blazing fast! Congrats man

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marklchaves profile image
mark l chaves

Agreed. Wicked fast. Congrats Drew on your high Google PageSpeed scores!

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saurabhdaware profile image
Saurabh Daware 🌻

Hi, I just went for plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

Usually, my portfolio is something that I use to test my skills. Before this, my portfolio was built in Vue since I was learning Vue back then.

This time I just wanted to see how far can I go without a dependency (and I had a lot of free time :D) and I do not regret it. I loved working in vanilla JavaScript.

Here's the website: saurabhdaware.in

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

I think it's good to know how things work at a vanilla level, certainly if you've the time to learn.

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marklchaves profile image
mark l chaves

Very cool. Impressive achievements list. And, very fast indeed. Congrats!

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pontakornth profile image
Pontakorn Paesaeng

My website and portfolio are still incomplete but I can provide my stack thing.

  • Gatsby
  • Emotion (Considering Rebass)
  • MDX
  • Github for repo hosting
  • Netlify for deployment

For the old one

  • NuxtJS
  • SCSS
  • Netlify
  • Github
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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

How are you finding using Gatsby? It’s something I was considering when I redo mine.

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pontakornth profile image
Pontakorn Paesaeng

Great. It does a great job creating blogs. With Gatsby, you can use data sources you like. Customization is easy.

Gatsby also provides adequate starter kits and plugins. You don't need to worry about Webpack config so much.

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brianemilius profile image
Brian Emilius

I'm on the JAMstack as many others. I use Gatsby/React with markdown files (markdownRemark).

On top of that, I use images I make myself or some I find on places like freepik.com where you are required to attribute the creator.

For image editing, I use Gimp or PS as needed, and for vectors, Illustrator.

Furthermore, I am fond of hemingwayapp.com and grammarly.com for proofreading.

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marklchaves profile image
mark l chaves

Cool. Ya, I love the Hemingway app. Been using it for years. Grammarly is great too. If you need a headline analyzer, I'm digging this one at the moment. headlines.sharethrough.com/

Enjoy!

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

Hemmingway App is interesting; haven't seen that one before. I'll give it a go-- thanks!

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totally_waqas profile image
Waqas

I went with a static site/blog generator jekyll and used minimal mistakes as theme. It's hosted on github pages and all I have to do is push a commit and my website automatically gets updated

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mitchartemis profile image
Mitch Stanley

My blog is currently using Middleman for static site generation and hosted on Netlify. Neovim for editing. I used HTML from a template on pixelarity.com/

I'm in the middle of a headless rebuild which uses Craft CMS for the backend - hosted on a tiny Dokku VPS, Nuxt.JS for static site generation, Netlify for hosting, and Tailwind for the CSS.

Link: fullstackstanley.com

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

Ah, I’ve been looking at possible CMS solutions this morning, how is Craft? Any other recommendations of ones worth looking at?

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mitchartemis profile image
Mitch Stanley

There's a lot to love about Craft. It's really easy to get an admin area set up fast. There's a decent plugin ecosystem available, and the free tier is pretty good for a single user website.

If you want to create HTML sites with it, the templating engine is Twig and it's pretty easy to use although requires building the HTML from scratch (Personally I prefer it this way so I can optimize stuff).

The downside is that if you need more than one user, or GraphQL support, then you'll have to pay for the Pro license. Personally, I just use the Element API plugin instead for generating JSON endpoints.

I've also used Ghost CMS (blog.snipline.io) which is pretty great too for a standard blog and includes everything you need out of the box. Theming is easy and it's self-hostable for free, also has good SEO out of the box so no need to worry about that. It's built in Node which is a little trickier to deploy than Craft (which is PHP) but nothing too bad.

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maksumrifai profile image
Maksum Rifai

i'm using material-ui kit, github and netlify for deploy my personal website:
maksumrifai.github.io
maksumrifai.netlify.com

using Wordpress CMS & Hostinger for business website:
desainerhub.com

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marklchaves profile image
mark l chaves

Mantab! Hostinger--keren. Selamat ;-)

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marcbeaujean profile image
Marc Philippe Beaujean • Edited

I used (headless) wordpress and gatsby to build my blog @ byteschool.io. Wordpress is self-hosted, frontend is running on Netlify.

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker • Edited

How do find using headless WordPress? I did a fair number of projects using WordPress in the past and being able to decouple the front & backend would have been nice.

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workalicious_yo profile image
David Kaplan • Edited

The WordPress REST API is very good now. I built a site using WP as the backend for my client to manage custom post types and then Axios with VueJS for the front-end. For me at the time, not having to build a CMS was a good thing.

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marcbeaujean profile image
Marc Philippe Beaujean

It was alright! A Gatsby plugin did most of the work in terms of hooking things up and fetching data.I'm not an expert at WordPress so customising some things was harder for me, but should be easier for you 😊

 
thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

That sounds quite useful actually. I've a project due to begin in the new year that we were going to use Markdown for part of it, but I'll take a look at AsciiDoc as an alternative. Especially if it is easier to extend.

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s_aitchison profile image
Suzanne Aitchison

I used Gatsby for my site Up Your A11y for very specific reasons that I wrote about here

I'm using Gatsby again now for some other side projects, and I gotta say I do love it. It gives you so much speed optimisation for free and it plays nicely with lots of CMS options.

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

Thanks for that!

As an aside, definitely going to keep your site bookmarked to reference when it comes to a11y.

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gergelypolonkai profile image
Gergely Polonkai
  • My blog was a custom PHP site from the early 2000s up to 2011.
  • In 2011 i built a new engine based on the Symfony framework.
  • In 2013, i switched to Python and rewrote my blog’s engine using the Django framework.
  • Somewhere between 2014 and 2015 i switched to GitHub Pages, using GitHub’s Jekyll version
  • In 2017 i went back to self-hosting, but still with Jekyll (although not GitHub’s version)
  • In 2019 i switched to Pelican, as it’s written in Python and i can hack it easier than i could Ruby

Today my site is available on https and dat (Dat browser like Beaker or DatFox is required). I also plan to make it available on IPFS soon.

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marklchaves profile image
mark l chaves

Thanks for kicking off this interesting thread, Jacob :-).

CloudCannon

Just to share. I'm currently moving my website/portfolio from WordPress to CloudCannon. More on the why behind this move here if you are interested.

Jekyll has built-in support for Liquid. Liquid comes from the developers of Shopify.

If I'm not mistaken, this site (DEV.to) uses Jekyll dev.to/p/editor_guide

I used the Jekyll Minimal Mistakes theme (excellent theme BTW). My customisations so far are in JavaScript and SCCS.

Here's the work in progress caughtmyeye.dev

Netlify

I'm using Netlify to host my PWA work. These projects aren't fully baked yet. But, here's a preview.


Comments are welcomed! ;-)

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drmikecrowe profile image
drmikecrowe

Personal pet project: factualsearch.news

  • React website (TypeScript)
  • Plop to create components (node + handlebars to template anything)
  • AWS S3 for static hosting