I've had a personal website for years, and although it's gone through a few revisions, I've always kept it simple. It's really acted as more of a contact information page than anything else. I didn't have a need for anything more. All of my code on was always on GitHub with everything else on LinkedIn. Recently, I've moved away from GitHub and don't like directing people to LinkedIn, so I decided to put together a simple web platform for hosting commonly requested information. Specifically, I wanted to accomplish a few things with it:
- Re-host blog information from my old, now defunct blog.
- Provide contact information.
- Display recent projects for anyone interested.
- Provide a publicly visible sandbox environment for me to play around with web app experiments in the future.
So this past weekend I decided to finally devote a Saturday to building a web application to meet these needs.
Platform: Ruby on Rails
I chose to build the new site as a Rails platform for a couple reasons.
- I've been doing Rails development since around 2009, so I'm comfortable with it and I knew it would make building a production-ready web app capable of my requirements in a weekend more feasible.
- The server hosting the web application was already Rails-ready from other projects, so it was less work to get set up.
Design: Material
Since this was a single-weekend project, building a responsive UI from scratch was out of the question. A CSS framework was the only feasible choice.
I've used a number of mature frameworks over the years, but for this project, I wanted a framework that would look decent and sufficiently unique with very little customization. Recently, I've had some experience on a different project with a newer framework, MaterialCSS. It aims to adopt Google's Material Design, and while it still has issues and unfinished components when integrating with a Rails app, I think it got the job done pretty well.
In addition to MaterialCSS, I used Masonry for help with layout and Chart.js for blog-related graphs.
Time spent: 2 days (sort of)
I didn't quite finish the project on the day I started due to a few issues. First, Material CSS was not quite as flexible out of the box as I would have liked, and it really didn't like playing with Turbolinks, so I had to play around and write some custom CSS and Javascript.
Since then, I've also fixed a few bugs and responsive issues, but it's 5 minute fixes here and there.
Wrap up
So chrisyuska.com has a new site! If you notice any issues or have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out.