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Thoughts on LAMP vs JAMstack content management systems

Chris Coyier recently published a CSS-Tricks post titled “WordPress and Jamstack”. It’s a great rundown of the pros and cons, and I’m in agreement on the whole.

The most important point for my own use cases is from the section titled “CMS and End User UX”.

Sometimes, we developers are building sites just for us (I do more than my fair share of that), but I’d say developers are mostly building sites for other people. So the most important question is: am I building something that is empowering for the people I’m building it for?

I really enjoy working on JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) sites, the dev environment can be spectacular. It’s wonderful to not worry about deployment, HTTPS, caching. BUT. I haven’t yet found a JAMstack content management system (CMS) that I love, so it’s not something I feel super comfortable reaching for in the majority of my client work.

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aaronzlewis.com

Another personal site well worth checking out:

aaronzlewis.com

There’s a lot of great stuff going on here: a cocoon for fledgling writing that’s maybe not quite ready for prime time yet but well worth sharing, web-like behavior in that the site pulls in content from various sources (Twitter, Arena, his blog, etc.). It really gives you a well-rounded picture of his personality.

The use of color and transitions is great too, usually when I see a site with this much movement and color it can come across as wacky / zany. That’s fine and appropriate for some personalities, but it’s not the sort of thing that I would go for on my own site. So it’s cool to see someone accomplish a friendly, colorful, and playful design without it feeling too over the top.

I like the tone of his writing too, particularly the “mentors, collaborators, & co-conspirators” bit on his Credits page. I’ve wanted to add something like this for a while but haven’t been sure how to present it.

It’s interesting, coming across sites like this makes me go back and forth about where I’m going currently with my own. On the one hand I’m really enjoying making a site that others can use, it’s been great to see how people use it. On the other hand, I can only go so far with making the theme really “me”. There may be other ways to address this though… worth considering!

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gemmacope.land

gemmacope.land

Gemma Copeland’s new site is online! This was really fun, one of the truest collaborations I’ve done in a while. Minimal JavaScript, Eleventy + Netlify, Arena API fun, unicode arrows, accessibility at the fore. It was an exercise in playful sufficiency, hopefully we’ve created a functional sandbox that she can work with for some years to come.

I’m hoping to write a bit more about the development at some point, particularly on working with the Arena API. Ran in to some interesting hurdles with block ordering! In the meantime, see the repository on GitHub and check out the making-of post on her website.

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On archiving/preserving websites

SB and I have been chatting about the whys, whens and hows involved in archiving a website. Archiving is always an uphill battle. It’s hard to take care of things as they age no matter what the material, and ageing code comes with a specific set of worries.

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