My Homepage through time

I finally decided to update my website.

After considering for a while a switch to some more powerful framework, such as a Wiki Engine (Instiki, PMWiki), a CMS (Radiant CMS, Joomla), and even testing whether it is really true you can build your own Wiki Engine in twenty minutes using rails, I decided to stick to iWeb.

After all, editing pages is really easy, I have no need of multi-user access, powerful blog engines, and fancy aggregators of dynamic content.

It’s that wonderful time of the year again!

… I switched to yet another technology: I am now back to Emacs and command line. The website is now powered by Jekyll, a static blog-aware website generator.

Whether it will make easier to keep the website updated, this is difficult to say. Jekyll is definitely an interesting tool to work and play with, reminiscent of Apache Forrest.

The fun part before the transition has been the evaluation of the different technologies, among which, I’ll mention: Sandvox, Gollum, ikiwiki, and Hatta. Why I ended up with Jekyll is the matter of a specific post … if it will ever come!

I switched the layout of the home page to Twitter Bootstrap. Very nice framework, the migration took a couple of hours (which include: adding a new layout for the front page, learning how to use git branches, migrating the typographical styles from my old css).

It seems like git, jekyll, and twitter bootstrap are going to be the three frameworks I will be sticking with for my home page for a while.

I have migrated the website layout to ZURB Foundation, mainly out of curiosity for the framework.

The migration has been painless and relatively fast (thanks also to Jekyll, which neatly separates presentation from content).

The new layout is, in my opinion, cleaner. I did not have to customize much, but I did not have any difficulties in deviating from the standard here and there, either. This is something which I cannot say of Bootstrap.

Both frameworks are great; the first impression is that ZURB is probably more effective for websites, while Bootstrap provides a bit more support for webapps (e.g. type ahead is available out of the box for Bootstrap; a Bootstrap themed date picker is also available — two components I use quite often). I did not have time to test ZURB on a webapp yet, e.g., so see how well it integrates with the corresponding jQueryUI elements.

There is an excellent comparison of frameworks available at “Vermillion’s Comparison of Responsive Frameworks”¹

See Switching from Jekyll to Middleman.

See Making my website leaner.

See Org Mode and Jekyll and, then, Moving from Jekyll to OrgMode an Experience Report.