New Website Launches - Created with Ignite

General - Sep 10, 2025

When I worked as a contractor for Apple many years (decades - ouch) ago, we were in charge of updating the dutch Apple website. I was suprised to learn that these websites were just static pages! Even back then it was seen as ‘the old way of doing things’. There was a lot of manual labor involved, but it also had some great advantages. Most importantly it was very fast and a simple webserver could serve many customers.

Forward to 2025 and it is time to refresh my personal website. I mainly use it to showcase the projects I work on both professionaly and personally, as an online portfolio. My old website was pretty outdated, both in visuals and content, and equally dated in terms of the technology stack. Since I am a developer and enjoy discovering and exploring new (and old) tech, let’s start there.

My main goal was to simplify things and make adding content (a blog) as easy as possible. I also wanted to keep the technology as simple as possible. So no WordPress, no CMS, no server-side pages, just a static website consisting of a bunch of files. Just like in the old days! But with the ability to programmatically create and maintain these pages!

Ingnite: A Static Site Builder

I ran into the Ignite project by accident, looking up some Swift tutorials at hackingwithswift.com. One of its editors cobbled together Ignite as a way to create website using Swift and presented it on the website along with some examples on how to use it. Quite a novel idea. It is described by its creator(s) as folows.

Ignite is a static site builder for Swift developers, offering an expressive, powerful API to build beautiful websites that work great on all devices. Ignite doesn’t try to convert SwiftUI code to HTML, or simply map HTML tags to Swift code. Instead, it aims to use SwiftUI-like syntax to help you build great websites even if you have no knowledge of HTML or CSS.

Since I was looking for a way to build a static website, and enjoy using the Swift programming language, I swiftly downloaded the repo and went experimenting. I started building a set of components and tools that help me create articles, have different blog categories and overview pages. The content itself mainly consists of .md (markdown) files, that are rendered into HTML at build time. Using markdown makes it easier for me to post my content elsewhere as it is a broadly accepted standard nowadays.

Publishing and Hosting

Now that I have my components and basic layout/design work done, it’s time to publish the darn thing. Thanks to Ignite, I simply press ‘Build’ in Xcode to generate the site, but how do I get it online? I stumbled upon Sevalla by Kinsta, which offers all kinds of application hosting for a small fee, but also static site hosting for the low sum of $0. It is limited to 1GB in storage and 100GB in traffic, which is more than plenty for a small site like my own.

And the killer feature? It auto deploys on git push and integrates with GitHub. So to publish my website, I generate the files, and push them into my GitHub repo. A few seconds later the updated website is online, no maintanance or manual busy work required. I love it.

Future Proof - Old School

It took some doing, but the whole process of writing a blog post and publishing it online is quite stream-lined as it is. It allows my to focus on the content and not worry about the tech. Also being a static website it performs reliably and fast. And if I need to change the host in the future I have plenty of options to choose from.

I hope you’ll enjoy following my indie game development journey with Uptown - a classic city builder for Mac.