It's time for a stack update!

Last year, I started a blog. Statamic v3 was becoming a thing, and I had spare time, so I decided to give it a try. Since building that blog, I've come a long way as a developer. I'll be posting my year in review very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

The blog was becoming a burden to maintain. Statamic is great, but it's waaaaaaay too powerful for the needs of this site. This site needs to be able to to understand markdown, parse it, and display it to the user. Anything that gets in the way of that only slows me down.

As developers, we often fall into the trap of complexity. Cool new tools become available, so we overengineer what should be a very simple concept to shoehorn in a complex solution. Whilst this is good for learning, it decreases maintainability. It was getting to the point where I was jumping through hoops just to write a new blog post, so I stopped writing. That should never be the case. This is a blog. A blog is intended to make writing simple, so that authors can share their experiences and knowledge with the world.

So, I decided to go back to the drawing board. Whilst building the upcoming Pest PHP news site, I came across Wink. It's devilishly simple and does exactly what it says on the tin. No more, no less.

So, I created a new Laravel site, installed Wink, and got to work creating a few routes to display content. You can see from the header image that it's just 3 routes: home, a blog index and a blog show page. The search directs to the blog index and filters the results. It really is that simple.

Please note that I've pulled across posts from the old install. There are currently some broken images and links on those posts, so bear with me.

Because of how simple the site is, it becomes much easier to update, maintain, and add new features to. It also becomes a much easier task to get straight to writing.

If you're interested, you can find the source code for this site on GitHub.

Remember, Keep It Simple Stupid!

Regards, Luke