The initial version of my new site is finally up. It took me almost two years to finally get started. You know how it goes, there’s always some more pressing thing to do. I found myself with two free weekends, so I decided there would be no more excuses.
Why build this site? The question cropped up when I was talking to some people about the idea and I often asked it myself when I was searching for reasons to invest some time into it.
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I’m a supporter of owning your own data. I have content elsewhere and it’s great for sharing and reach, but I always loved the idea of having a centralized place—a reference if you will. I’m planning to put my thoughts and projects here with links to external resources if more appropriate. We’ll see what happens after that.
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I needed a playground. The web is evolving super fast and there are so many things to learn and try out. Projects I’m working on often have strict deadlines and requirements, so compromises have to be made. With this I’m completely free to do whatever I want. For example, I don’t plan to support anything lower than Internet Explorer 9. The pain’s just not worth it for this kind of site. The fact this is my public playground gives me extra insights in how things work.
That being said, I wanted to try out a few things:
- Design a clean black site.
- Play with typography and web fonts.
- Use only ems across the whole website.
- Build a mobile and content-first responsive website.
For now, only I can say it’s hard. I knew that before, but I just want to repeat it for the record. It had to be static pages only (no server site logic) from the technical side, so I’m using Hyde generator to build it. I’ll add JavaScript for dynamic stuff when a need arises.
After two weekends I’m about 20% finished. There are a lot of things that have to be automated and refactored under the hood. And a lot more content written. But, everything in due time.