So here we are at 2015. And here it is, the finished product of my tinkering (which I blogged about earlier in 2014). Though by “finished”, what I really mean is it’s finished for now. As I’ve since thought of more things to tinker around with on KopiJunkie.net. But, in (informally) keeping with Agile development practices, here’s my retrospective on the process.

Moving my site’s front end structure from a PHP-based structure to Assemble (hence the name of this blog title!) was fun and interesting. But I discovered that using Assemble to support blog posts also requires more work than I had/have time for right now to make the user experience more on par with what WordPress can offer for a blog reader. I am quite interested in Ghost though and am looking into using that for the blog part of my site (as I type this, I am using WordPress to blog this thought).

For the CSS/Sass side, I really liked working with Bourbon and Neat as I had a lot of control over the style and layout structure of the site. My CSS needs for my site is pretty basic and something lightweight was more appropriate than going all out with something like ZURB’s Foundation or the popular Bootstrap frameworks or even Compass for the Sass mixins I would need. I’d say there is a fair amount of Sass code to write still with Bourbon to get all the functionality, helpers, components that Foundatdion, Boostrap or Compass offers. But you do get complete control over the site’s Sass-iness.

Another thing I was tinkering around with was hooking up the code from Github to be deployed using Travis CI for continuous integration (CI) to a bucket on Amazon S3 which is accessible at kopijunkie.me. In all honesty, this was done more for me to get some hands on experience with CI and Amazon Web Services. But as S3 is only intended to host static web sites this did mean that my contact form, the only part of my site now that relies on PHP, wouldn’t and doesn’t work on kopijunkie.me unfortunately. Of course, an alternative solution to this would be to embed a form created on Wufoo online form builder.

Now if you’ve been looking at my Git commits or the Travis builds, you’d notice that I’ve been having some problems with getting my JavaScript code to run on the S3 hosted version of my site. Annoyingly, I had just discovered last week that it was because the concatenated JavaScript code is somehow missing one of the files it is meant to include despite being within the comment block that grunt-usemin relies on to work out what files need to be concatenated. So that’s still on my TODO list to be sorted out for now.