Another year, another site redesign
New code, new design. Will it be enough to get me posting regularly?
Well, this is embarassing. It is exactly two years, to the day, since I posted about the reworking of my site in Eleventy. Specifically, I noted my lack of posting, and vowed to do better.
Jump forward to the present day, and that is still the last thing I posted on my site. And before that it was a gap of 6 years. Not exactly setting the internet alight…
But now I have finally done the redesign I planned 2 years ago, and I must say I’m rather pleased with how it’s turned out. Here are some of the main features:
- built using Eleventy 3.0
- social sharing images generated automatically using the OG Image plugin
- code examples rendered using Shiki with added language definition for CFML
- light/dark mode theme switcher (I prefer the dark)
- article reading times
- self-hosted fonts for speed and privacy
- blazingly fast – 100s across the board in Lighthouse
This time round I’ve reverted to using Nunjucks templates, rather than WebC. I found I was struggling too much to overcome hurdles, and didn’t need any further impediments!
At this stage, I haven’t added a CMS. I’m wavering between Decap CMS which I used before, and Tina CMS, which seems to offer something similar. But htey can be added in later.
What about the old content?
One of the concerns I had was that most of the (admittedly small number of) old posts are now hopelessly outdated, and not relevant to what I now work with. I did consider just deleting them (I still may), but I think for now I’ll just slap a banner on them to make it clear that this is old content.
Having said that, it would be nice not to have that reminder of my failure to blog – 17 posts over a period of 16 years.
What’s next?
I’ve recently got back into analogue audio (vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes), so there will be some content related to that on here. I’m considering an API connection to pull in data from my Discogs collection to display here on the site (I already have a records page ready and waiting…).
I’ll be posting much more often about code, but also about other things that interest me; for instance, some family history stories turned up in my genealogy research. Most of all, though, I just want to get into the habit of writing stuff!