My book group website

This is my book group website. We have been reading together for more than ten years.

Live Site: http://tampabaybookgroup.org

Tools

• Jekyll
• Hyde
• jekyll-amazon

Story

I maintained this site just by editing HTML for many years. I wanted to do something more sophisticated, but never seemed to get around to it. One day, though, I noticed that some of my old Amazon-generated links were no longer working. Rather than going through and testing them all, I decided to completely rebuild the site using Amazon’s API, so I could be guaranteed of getting good URLs.

A long time ago, I did a proof of concept using Postgres and Rails that you can see on Heroku, but this seemed like overkill for such a small site. So I just had to choose between a couple of static site generators that I was familiar with - Hugo and Jekyll. I had always wanted to learn more Ruby, and was already a gem to query Amazon, so I chose Jeykll.