Site updates

I quietly updated my site this past week. Recently I wrote about trying to figure out what I wanted to do with this site and this past week’s changes are part of answering that question. This wasn’t so much a redesign as it was an exercise is stripping things back. The design elements that I was using before are, for the most part, still the same. But I got rid of a lot. The site is HTML and CSS with the only JavaScript being my serviceworker.

I’m definitely still playing around with font sizing, line length, and more, but I’m the type that needs to get it out there and not wait, so I pushed it out, crossing fingers that nothing was too horrible. So far so good.

What’s probably more interesting is what I’m not doing. There are no web fonts, it’s systems fonts and so the scripts I was using to load all of that weren’t necessary. I’m not using sass for the first time in a very long time. My CSS is straight CSS using variables for the very first time. I also got rid of several pages since I’m not currently freelancing. This is an old school blog again and it feels rather good.

I also got rid of my email newsletter and deleted all the data associated with it. I’m finding keeping my site up-to-date hard enough these days that the newsletter, which had a very small audience, didn’t seem worth the effort. I’m focusing on RSS and cleaning up my site to highlight posts was one of the big reasons for making changes.

I’m still using Jekyll and still hating the fact that there isn’t a decent way to paginate pages that aren’t the index page, but I’ve lived with that for years at this point and right now I’m not in a place where I want to do the work of figuring out what to move to. I did glance at Eleventy, but decided I wasn’t up to the task right now. I love Netlify, it makes redirects and deploying super easy.

The biggest benefit of all the changes I’ve made is that this site is fast. It’s really fast when there is only CSS and HTML to download. And I’m doing well on the accessibility as well. That’s probably what matters most to me right now and what I care about on the web most, clean markup and accessible sites.

Now that this is mainly a blog again, I’m going to be trying to update it more. I’m using social media less and less and this feels like my spot and if I can perfect my iPad flow for adding posts, I think it’ll be as easy to update things here as it is on social media (:fingerscrossed:).