Happy new year!
I've made some exciting changes to my website.
The old blog: What went wrong? #
As I progressed in my web development course last semester, my standards for what a "good website" should be rapidly outgrew my old page, which was codged together out of basic HTML/CSS and served using nginx. I also began using RSS [1] to keep up with other blogs, which at the time I didn't know how to automate on my own site. This was when I knew I needed something more sophisticated.
Another eyesore (to me, at least) was the lack of posts. In hindsight, despite being busy the past four months with my most challenging courses to date, I don't really believe I was "too busy to write". Instead, I think my naively minimal approach was so minimal that it got in the way of actually writing. Any time I would consider writing a post, I would get tired just thinking about writing HTML tags manually, and that on top of whatever else I had going on at the time was usually enough to get me out of the writing mood.
What's New #
On the bright side, not having much of a tech stack made it much easier to start from scratch. I decided to use Eleventy, which is a static site generator. This way, I can write posts into markdown files and Eleventy generates the HTML. It can also handle RSS automatically, which is another great feature.
But the biggest change to this site is the improved readability on phones. Here's a picture of my old site on a phone aspect ratio:
Most people who visit my site will likely use a phone to do so, so this was unacceptable. I made great use of this blog template, which is designed with performance and mobile in mind, so this issue is thankfully resolved.
Although I didn't post anything last semester, I did find the time to quietly add email to my website. I have no misconceptions about the challenges of email hosting, especially in 2023. I should have no problems receiving emails, but I haven't extensively tested sending. I should be able to send to Gmail, but I still have to check if I can send to Microsoft, Yahoo, and other large providers. My ambition is still to sunset my Gmail accounts someday (more on why in a future post) but that's a long term goal.
I use and recommend Feeder, an Android RSS app available on F-Droid. ↩︎
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