Jeepers, this is like the 20th time I’ve rebuilt this site. Very few have actually launched. No one but me has seen them, and I’ve forgotten most of them.
I’m starting fresh. Except My Best S, which I’m proud of, all the old content, what little there was, is gone. Poof. Archived in a folder or git repo, never to be seen again. I don’t know, things change, I change. It’s good to start over. I don’t need or want to preserve everything I’ve ever done or said. Let’s be honest, I doubt more than a few people will actually read this. If you are reading this, hi.
This version of the site had been in the works for months. It’s not done, nor will it ever be. I’d rather have something up right now that’s better than what I had. Building a site for yourself is hard. I’m never happy with it, and I constantly change it and break it.
That’s the point of a personal site. It’s something to experiment with. There are no rules, or people to disappoint.
For the current version of this site, I’m using Astro. My previous site was in Eleventy, Jekyll before that, and Textpattern before that. Although I absolutely adore Eleventy, I wanted to try something new.
Brief rundown of what I’m using.
- Astro
- Lang by Arrow Type
- Alpine, but there’s not much JavaScript on this site
- SCSS
- TypeScript
- Netlify
DenoI had to switch back to Node because Deno 2.0 doesn’t work with Netlify without some work. Deno is rad, though. I’ll switch back to it when I can.- Playwright
- Vitest
Astro has been fun, and I’ve learned a lot. I’m also using it to build a new site for the agency I work for. Like most of my side projects, my professional projects benefit from them.
I don’t need a Content Management System (CMS) for this site. A CMS is overkill for a lot of sites. I write in Markdown, static site generators work with Markdown. The time I’d spend setting up a CMS could be spent doing more important things, like adding Easter Eggs.
This not a good post. To be honest, I just wanted to write something, so I had at least one post on the site when I launched it. If you’ve read this far, wow.