The Digital Neanderthal

Do you dream of self-publishing on Amazon Kindle? Or creating content for a static website built on the modern web development architecture of the JAMstack?

Markdown has been gaining traction due to it’s simple syntax and ease of use. Markdown markup is easily readable and practically publishable as plain text, unlike it’s HTML counterpart, bound to it’s native taggy surrounds. Pandoc is the swiss-army knife and will reliably convert into HTML, pdf, epub, wiki or myriad of other formats. You can give markdown a try. Thankfully, you don’t have to to learn HTML anymore to publish for the web.

30 years ago, when Sir Tim Berners Lee needed to name his invention, he settled on the World Wide Web because it:

“…stressed the decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global in reach.”

On the first ever webpage he decribes it like so:

…a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Building a website takes dogged determination. If you stick with it, you wind up with a platform to show off your awesome brand; you! Choose a ready-made plan like Wordpress or Wix and you are stuck with a convoluted system of extensions and dependencies. The compromised security and longer loading times may negatively affect your search engine rankings.

A website running on the newer JAMstack architecture delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. A Static Site Generator (SSG) is an automated build system that can quickly serve pre-baked markdown stored to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and has none of the moving parts of a traditional LAMPstack. A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content, rather than being stored on a single server. A CDN augments traditional web hosting, by caching content at the network edge, which improves website performance.