Personal Website
by Michael Brundage Created: 15 Jun 1993 Updated: 24 May 2014
I created my first website in 1993, using an FTP server and the beta NCSA Mosaic browser. My current site uses Jekyll, git, and DreamHost.
Back then, you could surf the entire World Wide Web in a day, and generating traffic was as simple adding yourself to the WWW Virtual Library and posting your address on Usenet. Creating a new website was simple: Write some HTML files in a text editor, and FTP them and your images up to an HTTP-enabled server.
These days, a successful website has many more parts:
- Low-latency design
- Mobile-first design
- Cross-browser compatibility
- SEO
- Analytics
- Bing and Google Webmaster tools
- CDN integration
- Ad integration
- Syndication
- Version control
- Atomic deployment
- …
For some reason, the tools for building websites have not evolved with the requirements. Lots of essentially static sites are rendered dynamically using Wordpress or other horribly inefficient technologies (many of which query a database for every page request). In 2014, we’re just now getting the first designer-friendly WYSIWYG editor that generates smart, semantic markup: Macaw.
For the latest version of this site, I authored content in HTML5, Markdown, Liquid and SASS, and code in Ruby, JavaScript, and sh.
For technical details, see the following notes:
