Why my website?
That's true, why my website, since there are so many on the Internet.
Well, by dint of browsing the web looking for solutions, I realized that many times, these solutions were not so obvious to find. At those times, I was thinking: _"It would be nice to have my website so that I could share this. Maybe it could be useful to other people". So much for the original idea: sharing. Quite obvious you might say.
What held me back was this bloody impostor syndrome but also to see how other people are so good at dealing with topics. I then said to myself (yes, I talk to myself a lot), "why address this when it has already been dealt with and that I will never reach the level of what has been written". But over time, by dint of reading by many people, that everyone had to share their point of view, my motivation grew. It's true, we can all express ourselves. The same idea can be approached by several people and each can bring new lines of thought or treat it with a different tone. People are free to appreciate this style and this content or not, but it would be a shame to refrain if you want to share.
Once this idea was rooted in me, I had to choose how to express myself. And there, one thing was certain, my content had to be my content. It's so obvious you're going to tell me. Yes, but with blogging platforms, we are at the mercy of companies which could close their service or modify their terms of use. At their own will. Our content may therefore no longer be our content.
Knowing that I did not have strong requirements for this website, except to have a blog and a few pages, it seemed to me quite manageable at my level without having recourse to this kind of platform.
So I got to work with my little hands.
What's under the hood?
To speak a little more technically, as I have just indicated, since I had no particular needs, for me, it had to be static. That is to say, not having a database, scripts at all costs or whatever. No need to pull out heavy artillery when the basics of HTML / CSS / JS are enough.
Since the article [from Smashing Magazine onto migrating to a Static Site Generator (SSG)](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/a-little-surprise-is- waiting-for-you-here/), I admit that I had it in mind to use one the day I should have a website. In a previous company in which I worked (hello Slickteam), I had also written an article (in french) on the migration to SSG. I had carried out a POC (Proof Of Concept) on the time granted to us to train ourselves on subjects that interested us. For this POC, which was a migration from Wordpress, I chose Hugo. At the time, using simple HTML files with CSS was already obvious to me, but it reinforced my idea that static had a future. More than three years after this article, the SSGs have evolved and many newcomers have entered the dance.
As I said, I had chosen Hugo, which I used for my first versions of this site (never finished) but since the beginning of 2019, [Eleventy](https://www.11ty .dev/) popped up under my radar. I admit that being more comfortable with Javascript than with Go, I told myself that if I had to get my hands dirty, that would be an advantage. But there was not only this aspect, it also seemed to me to be easy to pick up. So I decided to take the leap. For this version, I therefore used Eleventy.
The technique is nice but the content is better
About the content, for the moment, I will only write on the technical sphere. No politics or personal subject, even if I know that sometimes it will itch me. Moreover, as I have already read (and I share this vision), code and technique are already political in themselves.
You will therefore find on this blog, information on the evolution of this website and what I learn from it, my experiments, problems that I have encountered and how I solved them.
These articles and notes that I will write will be in English and French. Indeed, I decided to make a multilingual version. I had said to myself at the beginning that I would only do an English version but I changed my mind. I thought that this is an opportunity to confront myself with the internationalization of a website (even if it is very small).
So, an English version, because it's the language that makes it possible to reach the widest audience (I'll also take the opportunity to improve my writing in this language) and a French version because I'm chauvinistic . No, especially because I know it can be difficult to find resources in my mother tongue. In my case, sometimes I just want to find articles in my language and not have to do all that work to read and understand an article in another one.
What about the future?
Now that it is online, it will stimulate me to develop it. I don't know what I will add in the next steps, because there are so many things I would like to put in place... but anyway, I am motivated.
What is certain is that it will put my mind as ease now it is in nature. It is very far from being perfect and from looking what I envisioned, but it has the merit of being there.
Unlike previous times, where I didn't want to upload it unless it was finished or the design suit me, I changed my mind. I tell myself that by putting the content first, well now, I have something to share it.