The “huh, I should redo my whole website” itch is… well it’s a little silly, isn’t it? I personally go through it once or twice per year, although I’ve gotten much better at ignoring it for the past few years. It’s happened again though, and here we are!
It’s a silly itch because absolutely nothing was wrong with my old site. Just like there wasn’t much wrong with the one before it, and the one before that was just fine too. I’ve outlined a few things I’m looking for in my personal wesbite before, and they’re worth restating:
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I want it to still work six months from now. Part of the itch comes from the fact that, because I infrequently work on this site, the stack that it’s built on becomes a little stale in annoying ways. Whether it’s a library being slightly out of date that causes other things to stop installing correctly, an experimental deployment process that becomes too brittle, or something entirely unforseen. This problem is almost entirely of my own making, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
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It’s got to look decent. I’m not a designer and I prefer a plain aesthetic so this isn’t too hard. The practical implication here is that I would prefer a framework, or even a nice starter template, that helps me avoid things like needing to copy/paste a header snippet into individual pages of HTML.
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I want it to be easy to author content. Another relatively easy one, but an important one. I even tried using Notion for this at some point, which I wrote about a while back.
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I want it to be ‘neat’. Maybe a little antithetical to my other goals, but I learn best by doing and it’s been very helpful for me to use my personal website as a fun little project.
All of that being said, welcome to my new wesbite! It’s built using Astro and the wonderful Astro Cactus template.