This Website

I've had loads of different websites over the years, and really got fed up with Wordpress and having to do security updates for a really top-heavy bit of software, whose features I mostly don't even use. I'm also quite sick of the web being just huge janky javascript applications that break the simplicity of structured text, images and hyperlinks.

It is important I have a site that I can dump details about projects, as a reference for me but also to share with students/colleagues/the public. In the past I've been really bad at keeping records, and I've got a lot better since making the site.

I knew about site generators like Jekyll, etc. and to give that a bit of a go I went with Eleventy. It is fine I guess - like so much Javascript stuff it is overcomplicated (using Node, compiling CSS, Nunjucks, all that shenanigans) and feels like it could be brittle and just break impossibly at some point. But for the past few years it has served me well, and it allowed me to personally write the HTML and CSS, which at least keeps the final files small and simple. I do like how it converts and resizes images on my behalf, and pages like this one are just written in Markdown for the most part.

I host the pages on Github Pages, because I qualify for an educators account, and it saves a few quid a month on hosting. The whole site is open source so you can find it all, and the history, on Github too.

You can check out my website here.