Welcome to my website! My name is Michael Marley, and I am an IT Software Developer at SAS Institute in Cary, NC. I develop Java code for work, but I also have varying amounts of experience in other C-like languages, including PHP, C++, and C itself. You can find links to some of my projects on this site.
Posted on May 15, 2016 at 15:30 EST
I recently rebuilt my website based on a simple, no-frills Bootstrap theme and a mostly-static backend. I had been running Drupal 7 for years. Drupal 7 worked well for me. It did everything I needed (and a whole lot more) and was rather speedy after being optimized appropriately. Late last year, Drupal 8 was released. I (rather painfully) upgraded, which required several hours of manually mucking around with SQL to get the data migrated from the Drupal 7 installation and several more hours of tinkering around with various modules in an attempt to set up a usable spam prevention system. Despite the fact that I have a decently fast server with a decent Internet connection, the site was still significantly slower than it had been under Drupal 7 while using significantly more CPU power to operate. I also ran into a number of other deficiencies, such as the inability to configure a separate administrator mail address and system mail "From" address.
Because my site is simple, rarely gets any modifications, and doesn't require user accounts or such, I decided to rebuild the site without a CMS. I considered using a static site generator such as Jekyll, but after reviewing the dependencies and considering my site's extremely low traffic volume, I decided the best approach would be a manually-created static site. I picked a simple, responsive Bootstrap theme to use and implemented the pages in PHP only so that I could use includes to eliminate the need for copy-pasting elements in multiple places.
If you have questions, comments, insults, or anything else you desire to share with me, please check out the contact page for my information.