It should come as no surprise to you that I am not a full-time web designer/developer.[1] And despite what appears to have become a bonafide theme of this blog, I don’t just sit around all day, reading articles about The Force Awakens.[2]
No; in the real world, my J-O-B job is that of a professional tooth carpenter. In the more common vernacular, a dentist 😷
About a month ago, I was going through a transition time with my work situation. Through that, I realized that for all my constant fiddling with my personal blog, my professional persona had no “official” online presence (unless you count Twitter, of course).
How would patients find me if I left one office for another?
I needed a website.
I thought about doing something similar to what I have done with TheOverAnalyzed: a static blogging engine hosted/deployed via Heroku.
The only problem with that is that I didn’t know (and still don’t know) enough about JavaScript to tweak Casey Liss’s core Node.js app to remove all the “blog-aware” features of his engine.[3]
Initially, I asked Casey if it would be easy to tweak Camel into being more static-y and less blog-aware than it current was. His reply was that doing so would be difficult.That was unfortunate, because I liked having command line control over my blog. It’s certainly a lot faster than using a traditional CMS, and it’s just plain nerd-cool.
Still, Camel wasn’t an option for my dental website.If not Camel, what? What else was out there?I asked Casey:
@caseyliss know of something that’s a blank slate like Camel? (Not Squarespace or WordPress or another CMS?)
— Anthony Craig (@ToniWonKanobi) December 21, 2015@ToniWonKanobi github pages?
— Casey Liss (@caseyliss) December 21, 2015Up until asking Casey, I had no idea GitHub Pages existed.
I’ll detail in a future post how I got my dental website up and running via GitHub Pages.
Until then, head on over and check it out: http://anthonycraigdds.com
(Duh). I’m embarrassed to note that if my website were a public GitHub repository, you’d find the commit log—chalk full of commit messages like “fixing CSS”—would be close to 1100. ↩
Not that I wouldn’t mind doing so 🤓 ↩
Why would I want to do that? Well, I don’t plan on blogging as Dr. Anthony Craig all that often (mostly because dentistry isn’t really that interesting to non-dental people). So all the nifty blog-aware stuff Casey has written into Camel would be lost on my dental website. ↩