website refresh

man moves from SPA to SSG

31/05/2023

KISS to the max

I've made plenty of websites in my time. All of which have been AJAX/SPA and heavily dependant on Javascript. All of which have been slow to first paint. This time I've gone for something different: the new old way, using eleventy and hosting a static site. Keeping everything as simple as possible should be great for accessibility, SEO and maintenance, and should be easy to keep looking clean.

Easy Blogging

Writing devlogs and blog posts with my old site had a fair amount of friction, tagging and linking posts, keeping a flatfile database for timestamps, custom scripts to invoke markdown-it... Eleventy handles all of this effortlessly. With front matter tagging and dating, automatic tag page generation, pagination, and more, writing a new post is as simple as spewing thoughts into a file and saving. Hopefully this leads to more blogs, which spur me on to more code!

What's next?

Now I've got a half-decent site up, work on as yet dodgeball can continue in earnest. I hope to post a devlog once a week, but there'll be more or less depending on how busy my life is at the time.

The site still needs some accessibility work doing, and I could tweak my CSS forever... But I need to get better at reaching and recognising a finished state. So it'll do for now.