This is at least the fifth iteration of my personal website, going back to 2006 or so.

The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, from wordpress.com to self-hosted wordpress, to multiple self hosted wordpress blogs, to a 'professional' site on Squarespace.

But the trend towards block based editors makes me frustrated. More and more, I just want to publish words. Write a markdown file, proofread, and ship.

A nostalgic afternoon reading all I could find on the Indieweb, the return (?) to personal websites and hand crafted pages re-ignited a fire that was smouldering inside me. So it's a return to basics for me - minimal design and a focus on writing.

I took much more inspiration than made it into this iteration of the site, but here's where I'm at:

What's in #

The site is built with Eleventy and deployed on Netlify. Eleventy lets me write markdown and publish with a single command and I am so grateful for that. And its creator, leader, chief maintainer Zach Leatherman is earnest and funny in equal measure.

The site began via the Eleventy Base Blog starter but with some interesting (to me) additions:

• the way blog posts are listed are inspired by Simon at Photogabble
• I started adding short post descriptions after reading Dana Byerly's blog and her junk drawer
• I'm refactoring much of the Eleventy configuration based on Lena Saile's configuration model because it makes good sense to me.

What's to come #

• As I learn more about CSS, I want to add the flowing space as deployed in Lena Saile's Eleventy Excellent starter, which is based on the ideas of Andy Bell. But I'm adding it bit by bit because my CSS skills are rudimentary and I want to understand what I'm doing.

• In the meantime, I'm cleaning up the base-blog css based on the ideas of Kev Quirk and Simple.css. Plain old HTML without CSS classes. Again, it's more a case of getting the styles back to the studs so I can learn as I go. I'm using that as my base and adding on what I need to get to Andy's vision, as my knowledge grows. Right now, every time I dive into the CSS files I'm wondering what I was doing the last time! This is going to take a while.

• Typography is every changing. If you're seeing serifs, it's likely the Newsreader font. But I switch between that and Atkinson Hyperlegible, which I learned about via Erik Kroes.

• Thanks to Henry I got Newsreader installed as two compact variable webfont files.

Perpetual Construction #

So. I'm going to be adding more words -- new words and bringing back old words from my 15+ years of baking and blogging.

And at the same time, I'll be changing how the words look. Tweaking styles, adding stuff in an unhurried way. What fun.