As I've previously shared, Grav has been my CMS of choice. It's an open-source project that packs a massive number of features into an incredibly light-weight package. In response to a recent request, I'm putting together a quick tutorial on how to get up and running with Grav.

My projects, both at work and at home, have recently reached the point where there are too many styles to handle without some sort of system in place. I've dabbled with various ways of structuring my stylesheets in the past, but have never firmly adopted any single methodology. After much research, twitter threads, and several trial runs, I settled on BEM and am in the process of a grand restructure.

For my newest project, I had settled on an Angular front end, but I hadn't decided how I wanted to handle the server side of things. I had finished a rough draft of a Node powered API using Express when a coworker recommended I look into Amazon Web Services. Turns out AWS is fantastic. It allows users to create a completely serverless solution. Let's dig into what that means.

In my foolish, not-too-distant past, I have taken pride in being a javascript purist. In an effort to keep my sites as lightweight as possible, I avoided front-end frameworks and libraries like the plague. After all, any semi-capable JS developer should be able to write their own tools. Or so I thought.

This blog was my first project in Grav, and provides what may be the ideal use-case. As a blog, it is a simple, content driven application. The layout is straightforward with a clearly defined flow: simply set the content and it will be rendered. There is little to no interaction requiring user input. The admin panel is gorgeously designed, covers most of the basic needs of site management and is a delight to navigate.

While I enjoyed the process of creating my own minimalist blog platform with Ruby, it quickly became apparent that it was impractical to maintain in its current state. Specifically, I did not have an editor to add new posts. Instead I had to create my posts in a text editor and manually add them to my database. My options where to either improve my custom CMS, or to adapt an existing solution to my needs.

As many of you may remember from my previous post, I had an unfortunate mishap with my first attempt at a home theatre pc. Well I’m going in for round 2, armed with a raspberry pi, extra fans, and the brainpower to remember to ground myself before touching anything important.

I finally had enough of the hellish ordeal that is shared server space and made the swap to a Digital Ocean droplet. For those unfamiliar with droplets, they are cloud based virtual machines. Basically it’s a linux machine that you can do whatever you want with. They are simply phenomenal.

Static pages are a poor design choice for blogs for a number of reasons. There are simply better ways. I decided to explore some of these options as I revamped this blog’s infrastructure. I settled on using Sinatra as my framework, Handlebars for templating, and SQLite to store the content.

And learned a valuable lesson about static electricity.

Turns out that static and motherboards are an unhealthy combination. So this is the story of how I completely ruined one of my more promising projects. This is the story of the life and death of CraigBox, my onestop media box.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a student of web development, amatuer coffee aficionado, longboarder, and hopeless film addict. I am currently working as a front end developer and am about to hit 6 years in East Texas.