Colophon

Colophon is a fancy word for "how this site was made". I've been seeing more of these on personal sites recenly and really enjoyed reading them, so here is mine in return (bet you couldn't wait!).

Set-up and Tech Used

This site uses Eleventy to generate pages. They are created with Markdown or Nunjucks, and styled with vanilla CSS.

I was going to use Netlify do deploy, but ran into some DNS issues. I wanted to publish the site sooner rather than later, so I moved it to Vercel, and will probably come back to Netlify when I've had some time to workout the DNS problem. In either case and as is very common, it redeploys automagically from a new push to Github.

A little while ago, I finally found the thing I was looking for - a better way to handle responsive design and breakpoints. That is, abandoning breakpoints (more or less) and fluid responsive design with Utopia. Not too sure if I've grasped it properly yet (and maybe having some design skills would have helped), but it's already a much nicer experience than wrangling a bunch of random brokepoints.

Design

I am not a designer and so you can probably tell I've designed this all myself. I have to say, it's gotten better over the years of working with designers and implementing UI, but obviously there's a lot to learn. A big part of this project is to learn more, experiment and get better at this.

To Do

Right now, this is all a work in progress, and likely will be for some time. In the spirit of iterative development, I decided to just launch something and improve later.

To give you a window of what I'm thinking, here's my rough plan for the next few steps, more or less in order of "priority":