New Blog, who dis?

It’s that time of year again: personal sites getting a new lick of paint to close out the year. My personal site has been limping along for a few years now with some extremely basic CSS. It was also running a static site generator—Eleventy—but now it’s built with WordPress as an ultimate throwback to when I first started building websites for clients, back in 2009.

It’s extremely not finished. If anything, it’s just the start. I wanted to give myself a nicer starting point, so implemented CUBE CSS with Gorko and Sass. I also blew the dust off a basic WordPress theme starter that I made years ago, which was reminscent of Starkers, to give me a clean slate.

I don’t have a problem with Eleventy: I’m a big fan of it, but I also wanted to get back into more traditional web development stuff, now that I’m expanding my business into an agency. Eleventy is also a static site generator which meant writing was like working, by proxy of sitting and editing markdown files. I wanted to change that to encourage more writing—away from work, so I rebuilt the site with WordPress—mainly because I really like the block editor.

I did do some exploration with Kirby CMS too because I think that will be a key technology for client work in the new year. It really is a fantastic CMS.

Anyway, I hope you like the new dim look and feel I’ve gone for. I didn’t want to mess around with dark mode and light mode (I’ve spent too much of this year messing around with that shit), so went for the middle ground. The fantastic Cartridge font does all the heavy lifting in terms of character too.

Next year, I’m gonna probably make the front-end super creative, so keep an eye out for that.