I redesigned the site again, which is funny because the last redesign was two months ago. Developments in frontier AI models have been so interesting though, and having access to Anthropic’s Fable for the short time it was available took me from testing stuff out to whoops, I redesigned the site again.
I’ve rebuilt this site a few times now. Not a full rebuild, more like the kind of thing where you touch one CSS file and end up rewriting three others. Each time I do it, I think about whether I should just… do it properly. Migrate to something modern. Maybe Next.js. Maybe Astro. Maybe whatever the new thing is by the time you’re reading this.
I’ve been sitting on a version of this site that I built sometime around 2018 or 2019, back when I was learning more front-end seriously and wanted a place to practice. It worked, mostly. The bones were fine. But it had the kind of accumulated debt that happens when you build something to learn and then never really go back to treat it like a real project.
In my previous post I wrote about Jekyll and it’s integration with Github Pages, and I mentioned how Github Pages whitelists Jekyll dependencies in your build, essentially building our Jekyll site with the --safe mode flag. As I thought about how we might go around this, switching over to Netlify was a thought that came up that could get comments and syntax highlights going. I also realized I could just build the site locally and push my static pages over to the Github repo for my site, but seemed hacky.
Jekyll feels like a great place to start, again. Ruby and RubyGems is familiar, I’ve gotten the hang of switching between Ruby environments with rbenv, and I like the idea of packaging Jekyll themes in a RubyGem. With Jekyll we can also style with SCSS, write posts in markdown (kramdown), and do kinda-dynamic stuff using HTML with Liquid—sweet.
My experience with web tools fell exponentially after high school, when computer science courses intrigued me with ‘actual’ programming languages like C++ and Java, with a little Python mixed in with discrete math curriculum.
I’ve finally started to get projects up and running thanks to GitHub and frameworks that make deploying a site or web app easy.