RamiMassoud.com v3 Launch 🚀

Four months, 200 commits, and 125 pull requests later, my new site live! Which you probably know since you're looking at it. Or maybe don't know since you've never been here before? 🕵️‍♂️

Built With Statamic™ & TailwindCSS™

It has been so much fun coding up the design! I started from Jack's Statamic Starter Kit: Cool Writings, which gave me the perfect foundation. Building with Statamic and TailwindCSS has been fantastic! The two complement each other perfectly.

Both Statamic and Tailwind excel at making it easy to do what I want. All around excellent developer friendliness, and incredible power through simplicity. Statamic has simplified so much for me, making it much easier to host and manage this site. While Tailwind has simplified CSS so I can finally wrap my head around styling a site.

How about some highlights?

Very On Brand

No Longer Questionably Interesting

During the rebuild, I decided it was finally time to retire the site name and tagline that have served me well for so many years. I don't know when I titled my blog Things of Questionable Interest, but I was likely still a teenager. Even if my self-deprecating sense of humor has carried over into my 30s, it's time for at least my online presence to grow up.

Livin' The Flat File Life

There are tons of use-cases where the benefits of a database far outweigh the added complexity, but mine is not one. This site could almost be a bunch of static HTML files, so a database-driven application is way overboard.

Removing the database from my stack for this site has simplified things tremendously. Every time I've had to migrate this site to a new server, the database step was always the most error-prone. I also don't have to worry about managing database backups anymore!

Now I Git It

Since I'm working with flat files, it can all be versioned in Git and pushed to GitHub! 😎

Git has been part of my day-to-day for years. So it's great to rely on it to track code and content changes. Now I have a comfortable workflow I can be confident in, AND the site is way more portable.

Plus, I can use all of the great features in GitHub to both manage making updates, and keeping dependencies up-to-date.

MVP MVC

My entire career in software has consisted of working on web apps that used the MVC pattern. Finally, my own site does too.

There's a lot of power in familiarity. With my old site, it felt like I needed arcane knowledge to make code changes. So I'd install a plugin that kind of did what I wanted instead. Between the excellent Statamic docs and familiar layout, it's been incredibly straightforward to know where and how to change whatever I want.

Blazing Speed 🏎

Statamic offers both image optimization and great caching in core. So I got a significant performance boost with minimal effort.

If I want to optimize things, I knew exactly how to because of the familiar app structure. The Statamic version of a page with tons of images and embedded content rendered with 360% fewer requests, 350% smaller payload, and loading 200% faster!!

No More Excuses!

New CMS, new design, and momentum! I have to write more now, right?!