Yearly update?

After finally trying Eleventy in 2019, I first published this website end of August that same year. The code was based on Andy's Hebra and Hylia starters. At this point in time, I was planning to build this iteratively, starting with a HTML-only skeleton. You can read my first blog post to know more. It looked like this:

Basic web page with black text on white background

In September 2019 I change my plan as I started working on a full refactoring on another website, which I finally pushed live a few weeks ago. In the meanwhile this website was left untouched until April 2020. This is when I decided to add some CSS, mainly some green color shades and a dark mode, based once more on Andy's resource. I wanted the text to overlay the color shades in the background, but the result was pretty unfortunate. One of the main driver for this update was the Marvin Visions variable font I kinda fell in love with. I just had to feature it prominently on the website. You can read my blog post I wrote by then. Here's how it looked in dark mode:

Web page with white text on a dark background, a big & bold green headline in the middle

I was satisfied with the result for a while but I once again left the website untouched for months. I think the main reasons are:

  • The 80s vibe I went for was slightly off and not in sync with my current aspirations.

  • I like the flexibility and the power of Eleventy, I even bought Andy's Learn Eleventy From Scratch. But the templating, data files, options were a bit overwhelming, especially when I go back to a project after many months.

  • Quite a few folks started to advocate for a pure HTML and CSS stack, Chris Coyier capture the conversation on CSS-Tricks, and this resonated a lot with me: I realized the idea of maintaining a website with its node_modules dependencies made me anxious (and reminded me of issues with gems after a long overdue Jekyll update).

These frustrations quickly led me to start yet another rework of the website code and visual vibe. I will describe the process in details in the next blog post, but you can now visualize the result here.