New Website!

I made a new website!

So why change?

I had a stock Wordpress website but I didn’t really need the power or cost of the hosted LAMP stack behind it. So I gave myself a lockdown project of rebuilding it. I also wanted to reduce the complexity, make the site faster and less complex.

I’ve also witnessed how the web is changing to become less friendly and bulkier with the rise in tracking technologies. Because of this an additional goal was to make the site with no javascript or cookie banners if possible. Just good old HTML and CSS.

What is replacing it?

I had a play with some static site generators and settled on . It looked easy to use and had template support so I could easily change the default themes (although I never bothered doing that with Wordpress lol).

It’s been an iterative process and the more I learnt the more I wanted to change things.I would keep trying new ideas, often choosing to abandon them altogether and keep it simple. 😂

I also decided to build on my experience with a self hosted GitLab. I’d succesfully set it up in a previous job to manage code changes from different suppliers but never got as far as trying the built in pipelines and CI processes. Now I can push any site changes to a repository and have them be deployed with a pipeline to different locations depending on the branch I push to. The pipeline automatically reduces and compresses any pictures, adds watermarks to my own pictures, and creates reduced size images for a mobile version of the site. Nice 😎

Now what?

There will be changes as there’s a lot I want to improve and layout bugs to fix. I’m also exploring options for allowing commenting and checking out GoAccess for site analytics as it uses no JavaScript and captures the info I’m interested in. Take that Google 💪

Hopefully I’ll find more time to write as I can focus on content rather than updating things.

LOL

Enjoy!