I’m looking to spin up a new personal website, after leaving my current one languishing for 5 years without an update. I built that one mainly to facilitate my transition from WordPress development to modern SPA engineering, but it’s kind of onerous to update since it’s not backed by a CMS, and the codebase is… well, it’s a first-attempt SPA built by a WordPress dev. :)

The new one will serve a similar purpose (I’m looking to transition into gamedev), but the challenges are a little different this time around — all of my work over the past five years has been on internal or otherwise not publicly available software, so I can’t really show a thumbnail collage of my recent projects. All of my personal, gamedev-related projects are in various states of unreleased or unfinished WIP, and they’re all individual features or systems intended to slot into a bigger project that doesn’t exist yet, so I also can’t really throw any playable demos up on itch.io or whatever.

So I’m thinking that the best way to showcase my knowledge/skillset this time around would be with a blog, where I can talk about some of the nascent projects I’ve been working on, the challenges I’ve encountered and how I’m approaching them, etc.

However, it’s been a long time since I’ve published an actual website, so to get started I’m trying to get acquainted with what the ecosystem looks like for this sort of thing in 2023. All of my domains are currently at Google, so I’m thinking about giving SquareSpace a try (since they’ve recently purchased Google Domains).

The pros for SquareSpace, as I see it currently:

  • Pretty painless initial setup (besides agonizing over which template to use)
  • Some flexibility to grow into it and customize to my needs over time, though I haven’t deeply investigated this yet
  • Zero time spent thinking about hosting or server-side whatever

The big con:

  • Totally closed-source, walled-garden type of ecosystem, so if I wanted to migrate eventually I would need to mostly start over from scratch.

I’m tempted to spin up something fully custom, so I can choose my own tech stack from top to bottom. But the major downside of that is that I would need to spin up something fully custom and decide on a tech stack from top to bottom. As fun as that sounds, I kind of doubt it would be the most valuable use of my time right now. It would also force me to think about things like hosting and server configuration which I have no enthusiasm for. I’d really like to get something off the ground within the next few days, so I can start writing content this week.

Any recommendations? Options I haven’t considered? Good or bad experiences to share? Any success/horror stories about SquareSpace in particular?

  • nickelEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Came here to say exactly this.

    I was going through these motions a few months back and bearblog was a top choice of mine. However, after doing a little more research, I found Hugo and a hugo-bearblog template. Combined with Github hosting I’m able to get the power of bearblog, but a lot more control over it. I’m free to take the entire thing anywhere I want, and it’s all under my own domain.

    Separately, I had originally tried Jekyll, but I found the install process to be cumbersome. I pegged it as being a ruby-based install. I loved being able to just brew install hugo and having it just work from the get-go.