New website: 2024 edition
2024/02/21
Earlier this month I finally took the plunge and blew away my old homepage in exchange for a new, sad, dopey-looking homepage.
I made my old website back in 2015. I'm still proud of it. I think it looks nice, especially for having been made almost a decade ago. While the technical side comes easy to me, the aesthetic side does not. I have to work hard to make something that's not offensive to the eyeballs.
Around 2017 I stopped working on my website, other than some small updates in 2019. Now, five years later, I was worried that I would no longer be able to build my website, due to an outdated Clojure version, obsolete dependencies, or some other problem. But it wasn't an issue.
My primary problem with my homepage is that it looked like an advertisement for freelance work. However, I realized over the past few years that I have no interest in freelance work. I could have removed the ad-like language, but the website is complex (for me), and it had been so long since I worked on it, I was concerned it might take too much effort to make substantial updates.
In my opinion, my old site actually looks okay on mobile devices. The menu bar is too small, and the content is probably too narrow—but I think it's okay for the most part.
My goal for my new homepage was to make something very simple. I want it to look as good on mobile devices as it does on desktop. This is nothing groundbreaking. But even with my old website, I accepted imperfections on mobile devices.
I recently read Learning Perl, so I decided it would be a lark to use Perl to build my homepage as a static site.
I considered using Hugo. If you don't care about having a bespoke design, Hugo makes it easy to quickly setup a static site so you can get to work on the content. That's the approach I took with Skate Buffalo.
I have made a custom theme for a unique appearance, as I did with Molly's portfolio site. It was a lot of work, and it required learning much about Hugo. That was back in 2018, and I haven't made a custom theme since then. If I wanted to make another custom Hugo theme, I might have to re-learn it all.
Instead I was inspired by learning about ILSSA to choose the tools that I would enjoy using the most. So for now it's Perl.
The new homepage still needs a lot of work. Before today, there was no stylesheet. I searched for "simple css" and discovered classless CSS. For the moment I added Simple.css, but I might look for another stylesheet or make my own. Whatever I do, I want to be light on the styling, but I still want the site to look good (on mobile and desktop).
And there are many little things I want to work on: an RSS feed, navigation between articles, pagination in the article list, and cleaning up the build script, to name a few.
So, this will keep me busy for a little while.