Nerd Stuff

What’s Next

The saying goes, “If you wait to launch until it’s perfect, you waited too long”. So, here we are. It’s live but will always be a work-in-progress.

Latest Improvements

  • I have Grid! I have Flexbox! This is my first site that is all that and no floats or clears or anything! (This is a big deal to me. It’s as huge as when I finally let go of the last layout table a hundred years ago and went full CSS).
  • Switched my icon font for SVG icons.
  • Made this site into a progressive web app.
  • Rebuilt the original 11ty site as a WordPress site.
  • Added lazy loading to the images
  • Reworked the Featured Images output so they can take advantage of lazy loading too.
  • Added features that stop animations for visitors that have requested reduced motion. Read Val Head’s article on using the reduced motion media query. // Read Brad Frost’s post about reducing motion with the picture element.)

Coming Soon

  • A good old-fashioned blog roll featuring social media accounts and websites you should follow.
  • More pages and sections like the coffee thing (in development). Wait for it.

Coming Later

  • I’m going to rework the CSS: add better correct use of grid layout. (I’m just starting with css grids and I REALLY didn’t do it right on this site). UPDATE 6 June, 2019: I’ve got grid! and Flexbox. This is officially my first website with NO FLOATS in my layout!
  • Rework the content from the original homepage. The site was more “blog-ish” to start and is evolving into something different.
  • I have some performance improvements that still need to be addressed.

Stuff I’m Using To Build This

This Site Is A Learning Experience

I started this site because I wanted to learn some new web development techniques and wanted to build an actual project as a place to experiment.

The other reason I started this site was to push myself creatively and have some fun. Websites have all started looking the same and sounding the same. I wanted to do something like what we did back in the 90s before everything got frameworked and bland.

This page will have short updates on how that’s going and what I plan to do next.

About The Site

This is a static site was originally built with a generator called Eleventy (11ty.io). This is my first site built this way. I have a lot to learn but in many ways it reminds me of how we used to build sites when I started (1996, aka “The Ancient Times”). I’m using 11ty to build a few other personal projects.

This site became a bit to complex for the original build. I needed some additional functionality that I’m not able to do with 11ty so I rebuilt it with WordPress. This version of the site is a great opportunity for me to learn about the new functionality available in WordPress v5.0+ (Gutenberg).

This site is also the first time I’ve built an entire site with just grid and flexbox for layouts – no floats. This is a big shift in the way I build sites and will be the way forward from now on.