Michael Carrano

Redeveloping my personal site

Published by Michael Carrano on September 17, 2012

At last I have relaunched my personal site!

There have been many changes that I have made, most importantly a complete new technology stack in which I forced myself to learn most of the technology being used.

I redeveloped the site using initializr as a boilerplate for the frontend which uses HTML5, Twitter Boostrap and various other scripts to make the site cross browser and mobile friendly.

I also decided to go with sinatra, nginx, and thin as the backend technologies that power this site. It was my first time using ruby and I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to develop websites using sinatra.

The most challenging parts of relaunching this site had to do with setting up nginx and thin to work together. I cannot tell you the number of times I set up and destroyed my droplet on DigitalOcean because I just could not figure out how to correctly configure nginx and thin.

Some other changes I made is to go with SendGrid for emails whenever someone uses the contact form. I also switched to using Disqus as the commenting system for my blog posts.

Luckily after a lot of trial and error and searching online, I figured things out. I plan to write a few technical blog posts detailing some of the issues I had and hopefully it will help others who run into the same problems I faced. I also plan on posting the source code that runs this site on Github.