Several months ago I decided I wanted to build a website for myself again. After letting my previous Vue.JS site fall into neglect I felt it was time to spruce things up and maybe try a different technology

I wanted to prioritise development ease and simplicity. I also wanted to be able to write blog posts and keep the writing for myself.

Thus I began looking at a bunch of different options, eventually settling on building a site with Hugo.

I got a theme and wrote up some blog posts and promptly fell off the wagon. The site just wasn’t sitting well with me, the styles weren’t quite there, the workflow to writing and deploying posts was a bit cumbersome.

So I decided to start again, Nuxt seemed like a great choice! I should also brush up those Vue skills I thought. I fired up a branch, saying “I’ll keep it simple this time”. 4 months later, still no new website. “Oh I just need to style this”, “Oh I just need to fine tune that” and on the excuses went.

Then it hit me, I was approaching my projects with the idea of hitting a place that was “just right” before moving forward with it. I was also choosing technologies that would get in my way, rather than ones that would help me get to my goal releasing a small website that I could write blog posts on.

So I decided to change my approach.

Rather than choosing a technology to “try” or “brush up on” I stuck with Elixir’s Phoenix framework, which is incredibly easy to install and get running. It also comes with Tailwind CSS taking the CSS legwork out of the equation.

My first priority was deploying. Specifically continuously deploying. I didn’t want PRs and merges and finding ways to delay putting things out there. Luckily fly.io makes it incredibly easy to deploy a Phoenix application, and doing so via GitHub Actions is a breeze.

In about a hour I had a deployed website! Granted it was the “Welcome to the Phoenix Framework” base application, but it was live and making changes would be incredibly easy.

So what’s next?

Well if you’re reading this, I definitely restyled from a base Phoenix App. And I likely got a method of publishing set up!

Maybe there’s styling, maybe there’s even navigation to this page, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I’ll be able to add those things quickly and easily because the way I’ve set this project up emphasizes making small changes that go live as quickly as I can make a commit.

Stay tuned! I’m confident there will be more to come.

2023-07-07