In the past few days I’ve rebuild this site for the 3rd time, and I think I’m finally stopping.

The first iteration of the website used Javascript MVC via Ember.js. It’s is a great MVC framework for interactive client side applications, I used it for prototype development at Bazaarvoice. However, for my site, it always nagged me that the client was rendering static data, since it increased their processing overhead, and added a bunch of bloat to the page that it didn’t need.

The second iteration used Python and Flask. This is another technology I was introduced to at Bazaarvoice, it was being used to develope an internal client configuration service, with a thin webclient. But again, for my site, it felt like too much work was being done at run time, and again, only to render static data.

The current iteration (version 3), is using static text files, and Jekyll. Jekyll frames itself as a simple blog aware static site generator, and it does that job admirably well. It supports simple templating, and markdown rendering.

After this third iteration, I’ll have a toolchain that puts all of the render effort into the steps that I need to do while editing the site. There will be a single build which puts together all of the dependencies:

• LESS to CSS conversion
• Javascript minimization
• Markdown rendering
• Template evaluation

And the rest, as they say, is history. But in this case it’s actually just static text file serving.

Checkout the GitHub repository for the site, or the About page to learn more about me, and see what else powers this site.