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Welcome!

3 min read

Planted: 17 months ago

Last tended to: 11 months ago

an old man taking off his hoodie

I’ve previously built two websites that I was pretty happy with :)

As I learned more about design and coding, I realized that it was better to start from scratch instead of refactoring.

This is the fourth attempt to do so in the past 18 months. Scope creep kept becoming a big problem….so I am taking it back to basics. A minimum viable site, or MVS, if you will.

Why This Form?

There’s a ton of nice ways to build websites. While Framer, Squarespace and Webflow have grown substantially and are easy to use, there were two major problems:

  1. I did not want to shell out an annual or monthly amount for any website.
  2. Being more design focused meant that I kept layering things on when I have neither the design or coding chops to really make my vision come to reality.

And there’s where Astro comes in. You can scour the net for why everyone (including me) is excited for it.

I went from the old tried and trusted Bootstrap system to figuring things out in Gatsby and Hugo. Somehow, none of those ever felt right. Astro did, as did Tailwind and SolidJS.

I then scoured the internet for some templates and idea of how people approached development with Astro. I then happened on upon this nice template which leverages Paco Coursey’s composable command menu.

Also there a couple of integrations that proved useful. But you can check those out in the link above.

Some further research revealed that many folks now have the text centred because we generally assume that the eyes look at the middle of any screen. Or maybe I am just very late to the party.

There were also some modifications:

Removed

Shiki Twoslash

I won’t be sharing any code snippets here…so it went the way of the dodo.

Introduced

Streams

This is essentially microblogging. I took cues from Twitter and every /stream of consciousness/ is limited to 240 characters. As a bonus, the latest one is always displayed on the main page.

These could be random thoughts or a quote I’ve liked and decided to share.

PhotoSwipe

A nice JS library for photo galleries. I’ll use it at some point.
Removed it. Will look to set up Fancybox instead.

Plyr

A lightweight media player. Also will be used at some point.

Footer

It has a small copyright thingy with an automatically updating year. It also has the current time based on your system time.

Miscellaneous

I deployed the site with Netlify as opposed to Vercel. I just like the former better.

Watch this space, there will more to come in the future! 🙃