Hi5Dev

Since I’m hosting my website on Github I have to use a 3rd party service for collecting data from HTML forms. I almost opted out of a static website content generator (Jekyll in this case) because of the bad experiences I have had in the past with online form tools.

Most of the online form tools want to include some sort of branding on your form, and require that you insert a script tag where you want the form to go. This causes all kinds of issues, not the least of which is the lack of being able to modify the form’s styling to match your existing website since most of them slap the form into your website in an embedded iframe.

Fortunately I discovered a really simple hosted form tool called SimpleForm that doesn’t care about branding, and doesn’t use iframes and script tags. All it does is provide you with a place to send your form data to. That’s it.

I’ve decided to build my website using Foundation 3, which claims to be “the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world.”

So far the results have been pretty clean, from a developer’s point of view, anyway, and I am actually very impressed. I’m thinking of using this framework to develop a Shopify theme. I’ve attempted to build a Shopify theme in the past using Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS framework, but I found it rather bulky, and difficult to work with, to be honest. So I never really got too far with it.

What I like the most about this CSS framework is how clean the responsive layout is, and how smooth it transitions when you resize the browser. Go ahead and try resizing your browser now to watch how quickly, and smoothly it makes the transition. The Twitter Bootstrap responsive theme relies on JavaScript, which makes it really slow, at least on my computer, when resizing the window.

I have decided to use github pages to manage my website. It’s a fantastic setup; ideal for a programmer. It gives me complete control over my website, at the same time as keeping it simple, and easy to manage.

The main reason I’m using github pages is because it comes with Jekyll built in. And having the entire website kept in a git repository means I can at anytime pull the entire website off of one server, and push it onto a new one without having to muck about on a server. It also makes it a whole lot easier to back up the website. All I have to do is push the source code into another repository after I push it to where it’s published live.