What is ortfo?
Ortfo has the final goal of providing everyone access to a great portfolio website building experience, without the need of any technical knowledge, but by being extensible enough so that tinkerers can make the most out of it.
The plan
Multiple projects are planned for the ortfo "ecosystem":
- ortfo/db
- the "database" layer: write description markdown files, get a JSON file out. Generate thumbnails, extract proeminent colors, and more
- ortfo/mk
- a static site generator that uses the JSON files generated by ortfo/db to generate a static website. Will need to provide a way to theme the website and be extensible.
- most importantly, if users want to generate their portfolios otherwise, they should be able to not use ortfo/mk, and rely on ortfo/db's Exporters to maintain a relatively automated process.
- a first version, now archived, was made in Go but was kinda messy (because I wanted to use Pug for the templates, and did a lot of things by hand), and had too much hard-coded for my own portfolio.
- i'm currently researching how popular static site generators are designed to see how I could tailor-make one for the ortfo ecosystem.
- ortfo/gui
- a graphical user interface, so that anyone can use ortfo without having to be a tech person. This project is currently a work in progress
- it should interface with ortfo/db, and ortfo/mk, but have a way to not use ortfo/mk if the user wants to generate their portfolio otherwise.
Why?
It started out as a personal project for my own portfolio, because I was getting annoyed at how cumbersome managing all the articles for all of my projects was. I wanted it to be as easy as possible to add new stuff to my portfolio.
I started out around high school with a PHP site and a MySQL database, then went on to hardcoded pages… And finally to the most sensible option: describing my projects in markdown files, and statically generating the site.
The thing is that showing off your projects in a cool way requires more data than you think:
- if you want to have interesting layouts on your pages (stuff like having images side-by-side), instead of a boring linear list of paragraphs, you need a way to express this.
- If you want colorful pages, having a way to extract proeminent colors automatically is nice.
- You surely need to show off the technologies that you can use in your projects, so having a way to describe the technologies you use is cool.
- Of course, a cornerstone of blogs and portfolios, having a tagging system to categorize your projects is useful, especially if you create a lof different stuff, such as electronic music, software and digital art (shamless self-promotion, woops)
- If you want to translate your portfolio articles (we don't all live in English-speaking countries), having a way to translate your articles is a must.
- For performance reasons, generating thumbnails is important, but can be cumbersome and/or expensive to setup