This site is now built with Laravel

For the last couple of years, my site had been built on WordPress, using the block editor. I enjoyed using those tools as a designer, and, most importantly, it was low maintenance. As someone who spends all day designing and building websites & apps, I didn’t want to spend a bunch of my free time maintaining a personal site - I wanted something that just works, and WordPress is great for that.

But then, late last year, there was some unpleasantness in the WordPress community, specifically around leadership, which turned me off using it going forward. I’m not going to dredge all that up now, but because of that I resolved to build a new version of my site and launch it by the start of 2025 using a different stack.

Well… that didn’t happen 🤣. I’ve been way too busy this year to give any kind of focus to replacing my website. That’s not to say I didn’t work on it at all. In fact, I’d built most of what it is now months ago. It just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. Honestly, it’s not where I want it to be now, but I didn’t want to put it off any longer.

Switching to something more custom has given me the opportunity to build out a section dedicated to my favourite hobby, gaming. In fairness, I could have managed this on WordPress, but I’m a designer/developer and had been getting the itch to write the code myself anyway, and this way I get to tweak it to my liking more so than if I’d have stuck with WordPress’ full site editing.

I work in .NET/C# all day, which I enjoy and am productive in, but for a personal site, hosting .NET Blazor apps felt like a lot of hassle in comparison to abundant LAMP stack hosting. I’ve always liked Laravel, and hosting it can be very simple. I considered the likes of Astro, and having this as a static site, but I wanted to give myself the upgrade path should I change my mind later. (Yes, I’m aware Astro can SSR, but I don’t particularly like the hosting options for that ecosystem). Working in .NET, I have the full power of the server available to me, and that’s what I get with Laravel, with the benefit of easier hosting.

I also chose to go with Statamic as a CMS. I’m using it locally only and opted for full static caching. It gives a number of benefits, like image optimisation, and a nicer way of interacting and managing my content on my machine.

There’s a lot more I want to do to this site, and I’m going to start making more of an effort. The first step was publishing the damn thing, even though it’s not as polished as I’d like. Getting it out there gives me more motivation to improve it.