Imam Ramadhan
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2 min read

What Jigsaw Taught Me About Choosing Familiar Tools

Why I tried a PHP-based static site generator and how familiar Blade and Tailwind tools helped me build a personal blog.

  • Product thinking

For several years, I kept trying to build a personal blog that I could customize freely. A hand-written static site gave me control but required more manual work. WordPress offered many features, but its component designs did not feel like what I wanted. I also tried Gatsby, although modern JavaScript was still unfamiliar to me at the time.

That led to a simple question:

Is there a static site generator that uses PHP or feels like Laravel?

I was already focusing on PHP and Laravel, so using familiar tools sounded more comfortable than learning another ecosystem just to rebuild the blog.

Finding Jigsaw

While looking through the generator list on Jamstack, I found Jigsaw. It is a static site generator from Tighten that uses Blade templates. That immediately made the project structure easier for me to follow.

Jigsaw also worked with Tailwind CSS, which I had recently started using. The combination gave me the parts I needed:

  • Markdown for articles;
  • Blade for layouts and reusable sections;
  • Tailwind for styling;
  • static files as the build output.

I did not choose it because PHP was objectively better than every alternative. I chose it because PHP, Blade, and Tailwind were the tools I understood well enough to continue customizing the site.

Finding a Direction for the Design

The blog design I was using at the time was inspired by Kresna. I liked that the site was clean, easy to navigate, and did not fill the page with widgets.

I used that as a direction, then adjusted typography, layout, and smaller components for my own content. Jigsaw gave me enough control to make those changes without first learning a new template language.

What I Learned from the Choice

Jigsaw did not become the permanent framework for this website. The current site uses Astro, and its requirements are different from the blog I was building in 2022.

The useful lesson from the Jigsaw experiment is still the same: familiarity can be a valid reason to choose a tool. A popular framework is not automatically the most practical choice when learning it takes attention away from the thing I want to build.

For a PHP or Laravel developer who wants static output and familiar Blade templates, Jigsaw can still be worth evaluating. Current installation details and requirements should come from its documentation.

References