Site Setup (Again)

I’ve been thinking about static sites a lot recently. Obviously this site is static, but at work we’ve been moving a dynamic site over to be static instead, not (in any real way) backed by a database. More on that in a future post, because it’s been a fascinating project.

It’s got me thinking about the limitations to this site: its UI isn’t as clean/customizable as I would like, it doesn’t rely on any current/in-vogue systems, and some of the markdown workarounds (particularly the one for spacing around bullet-pointed lists) just suck. Time to do a bit of a revamp.

Vercel

Most of my experience is with Heroku, so I want to try out something new-ish that is ideal for static sites. That’s Vercel. I have had some exposure to the platform - just today I was figuring out how to seed a postgres Supabase integration through Vercel. But I’d love to get more familiar with its deployment cycle and its preview apps. We’ll see how much I can get going on a Hobby plan.

Also (and please don’t break this deployment, GA), I’ll be happy to move on from Github Actions to a more robust deployment method. It does work, but excited to try out another option for this site.

11ty (Eleventy)

Why Eleventy?

Of these reasons, the ones that stand out to me are the control and the community. I based some decisions for the old site on not being as familiar with some frontend pieces, and wanting to hand-wave those away to get a site out there. And those ended up as points of frustration. This time around, I’d prefer to keep full control of what I’m putting out there, even if I need to learn some Next.js along the way.

And knowing the generator is not only stable but has a community behind it is reassuring - not to mention, a former manager who I greatly admire used Eleventy for her site, which looks fantastic.

Timeline

A couple weeks? It’s just me here.

The main pieces are figuring out what I want to keep, and how a user should be introduced to the site. It’s probably more effective to have some ‘about me’ stuff upfront on the homepage instead of whatever post I happened to publish most recently.

And speaking of posts - is that the primary content? Not sure! I’ll need to think through the site’s purpose, and align the frontend vibe and structure to that aim.

Beyond that, I hope/expect Vercel will make deployment straightforward. DNS is one of those things you only need to do a couple times a year, so you have to re-learn it each time, but I expect NameCheap plus Vercel won’t be too complex.

Time to start writing tickets.