Updating this website 👨🏼💻
My website used to be very much me talking about my web development skills, showing off projects and primarily about me getting work 🥱 The thing is, for the most part of the past 11 years, I’ve had steady employment with only minor stints into freelancing in 2016 and during the pandemic. So why was I intent on making the site about getting work?
A screenshot of my old website on the wayback machine. It was very bare and lead right into skills.
I decided that I wanted something more me, a bit more fun and maybe with a setup good for doing some writing. Whilst my site has always had a blog (I had clung onto some very old articles from the mid-2010’s that got OK traction at the time) it was not really designed for reading and was an aside to the home page selling-myself-fest and some ancient Joomla extensions that I refused to let die. This new version should remain simple and be readable and should purge a lot of stuff that was very yawny.
The old site was built on Nuxt as I’m very familiar with Vue but of late Astro has caught my eye. So I set out and I rebuilt the whole site with a new design. I used Astro (if that was implied previously) and for the first time decided to use CSS variables instead of Sass variables so that doing a dark mode would be a lot easier. Funnily enough this redesign is not the site you’re reading on now.
At first I went for a very fun, old Mac OS inspired design. It existed for a short while before I canned it as everything seemed a little too cramped and overcomplicated for my liking. That said I figured out how to force Wayback Machine to take an archive and got a copy on there before removing it and you can that version here.
The previous version of my site on Wayback Machine minus some dynamic facets that no longer load.
I liked it a lot but it just didn’t sit completely well with me and I wasn’t happy with it. I wanted something that was a bit more of a blank canvas that I could perhaps iterate over later. So I went very blue and simple. It’s a bit less cramped, easier to read and, for now, simple. I am considering adding a theme switcher in that will let people toggle between the current design and the previous one as well as a third, possibly too much version 😎 We’ll see.
This hasn’t been an overly technical post by any means but I wanted to start writing and this seemed like a good jumping off point.