I had this domain arunbabu.in from last 4 years (I will explain the funny story about getting the domain in a separate post). I always wanted to have a personal blog on my name. I begin with a WordPress blog initially, then it was having an issue finding a proper hosting, setup and so on. Soon after a year, I shut down the complete site. I was extending the domain every year hoping to bring back my site. I heard of JAM stack recently and really liked the idea. The free offering from netlify seems like a perfect combo. I built my static site with Hugo, was really fun, but I was missing a lot of nice editor in WordPress. Finally, after a lot of trial and errors, I thought of building a static site from WordPress and hosting the static site on netlify.

I am not going to explain the features of the static website here. The main point you should know is that it’s built with very less moving parts and can scale hugely.

So this website you see is written on a site powered by WordPress (A free publishing platform), hosted on a free version of Heroku, a static site is generated by WP2Static and hosted on netlify. So technically my hosting cost is zero for this blog (apart from the domain charges).

So you might be wondering why I picked this combo. Let me explain it to you guys.

1. WordPress – This is one of the platforms I got my hands on after the forum era (Yeah, you remember this Vbulletin and MyBB forms right?). WordPress is a free blogging solution, can be hosted easily, comes with a ton of plugins for almost everything. Also, you can customise it without pulling your head. I needed WordPress because I tried out Hugo, Gatsby and Vuepress for publishing. All are great tools, their editor lives in a simple markdown file and is great for a programmer. But since I am not a native English speaker, I miss the Grammarly plugin which corrects my English to an extend and other WYSIWYG features on markdown.
2. Heroku – I host the main WordPress on a Heroku free tier account because,
   1. I don’t want my WordPress site up all the time (Heroku’s free tier application shuts down after 30 min of inactivity and wakes up when a request comes)
   2. I don’t want search engines picking up this WordPress backend and indexing.
   3. Its dread simple to host something on Heroku with almost zero maintenance.
3. WP2Static – Huge shout out to the author. It’s an open-source WordPress which can convert your existing site to a static one with some clicks. Note: The plugin is not error-free, but I can understand the effort the author does to the open-source community and couple of my custom fixes made me running this plugin great.
4. WP2Static can build the static site and deploy directly to netlify. I use their free tier since its more than enough for my need.

Note: I am not saying these static website builders are bad. They are great choices, ships with version control and very easy to maintain (As long as you are a programmer). Though the are editors like forestry exists for static builders, things got a bit overwhelmed for the entire writing and management experience in these static builders for me (Note: This is also not the primary function of a static builder). This is highly based on my use case, maybe this WordPress static website setup won’t work for you at all. I am just throwing a simple idea if you want an almost zero maintenance-free fancy static website based on a WordPress blog.

• MacBook Air early 2015 model 128 GB – I love my Macbook Air and it’s my travel companion. I am really happy with the battery backup and its lightweight feature. Though, I have to agree that the screen is not any great, but helps me to accomplish the stuff I wanted to do. Time for an upgrade? No, not yet!
• Dell 21 Inch HD monitor – Yeah, who doesn’t like a big screen with a lot of code on it.
• Editor – I used the sublime editor in the past, but switched to Atom since its open source.
• Terminal – Hyper with Oh-my-zsh;
• IDE – Well, its PHPStorm
  • I use Material Theme as the colour scheme
  • Though I use PHP mostly in my programming tasks, and since I need to work with many other languages, I opt for the VS Code as my side IDE. I think I will move completely to the VS Code soon.
• Database GUI – Used sequel pro in past since I mostly worked with MySQL. But moved to table plus since it supports multiple database engines. Though I still run a lot of stuff on MySQL, the switch was due to the continuous crash of sequel pro on latest Mac OS.
• Tasks and Tracking
  • Todoist – For todos
  • Trello – For Project management
• Font – Fira Code. Since every day I have to write and read a lot of code, I use this font which seems beautiful and clear to me. I have enabled ligatures on atom and PHPStorm
• Misc Tools
  • Alfred 4 – This is my personal favourite, I have managed to create a lot of workflow on Alfred. I will write a small post on some of my favourite Alfred workflow.
  • Typora – This is my favourite markdown editor. Even this page is on markdown with Typora.
  • Brave browser – Though chrome is my day to day browser, I am slowly switching to brave since it’s also a Chromium flavour, the simplicity, inbuilt ad-blocker and Tor feature. Note: I still use ublock plugin on brave, and that’s my only plugin on brave. Edit: I have a plugin to spoof fingerprinting now.
  • Postman – Since I mainly work with APIs, this is my favourite tool. They do have a lot of features recently, and for me, it’s bloated now and started slowly with Insomnia client.
  • Password Manager – Lastpass is my favourite password manager.
  • Device – I use an iPhone 6 (Yes, it’s 2020) and use it for day-to-day activities. I also use a Redmi Note 3 since I need android flavour for security researches and other tasks.
  • Email Client – Spark is my hero here. They are doing a really good job.