Making this website!
Why now? #
Yes, it's 2023. I don't know how many people besides developers still maintain personal website.
Earlier today I tried clicking a link to the homepage of a band from its Wikipedia article. Not only was the domain parked, but a search on the Internet Archive showed various GoDaddy parking messages going back over a decade. (How much of their revenue do you think comes from domains that have been parked years like this?) But like everyone else and seemingly every thing else, this band does keep an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Everything on the web now is so concentrated, convenient, closed. So it would make sense that developers would keep their own websites both as a way of demonstrating proficiency, (check out my projects!) but also in that DIY attitude more common on the old surface web and that now thrives in the opensource community.
So this is me dipping my toe into that world! Boy, there are a lot of options to choose from. In my web development course, we built a portfolio project using the MERN stack (Mine was a fictional darknet market that sold... groceries - we all shared the same MongoDB collection). I'd also worked on a few Flask projects, including one that calculates the Area Median Income, the State Median Income, and the Federal Poverty level of people living in King County, WA.
For this website I decided that I would learn something new. I knew that the content I would host and serve would mostly be static, and low and behold I'm introduced to the concept of the static site generator! This sounds exactly like what we need, but with so many options which do we choose?
Eleventy, the one with the cute opossum as its mascot, obviously! I say that semi-seriously as someone who has spent too much time in the research phase of a project. There are just too many choices and sometimes you need to pick one. In addition to the possum, Eleventy has some solid documentation and an enthusiastic community to back it up.
As of this first blog post, this website is still using most of the defaults from the Eleventy base blog. I plan on writing more as I play around with different layouts and maybe trying a new templating language like Liquid. Definitely more work to do, like figuring out a good way to scale images in Eleventy. This possum logo is huge!
