I’m realigning the site, making it easier to hack on, etc. My original goal was to use my holiday time off to do a full scrub and change the theme, mainly to open up the types of content I could post here. As with all good intentions, I’m starting smaller than my ambitions would like.

This site has jumped off Grav (a “flat file” CMS built in PHP) and onto Eleventy (a node-based static site generator). Grav is awesome, but I don’t work with it that often and because I’m not super familiar with all of the pieces, I find myself forgetting how things were put together and otherwise discouraged from working on the site. (Again, mostly past me’s fault for not documenting better.) I originally swapped over from a static site generator to Grav I could have access to a server rendered administration interface on mobile. But honestly, I stopped using it after I found a way to jerry-rig an automation script on my phone to post directly from a markdown editor via iOS’ Shortcuts. A hacker to the end, I guess.

Eleventy, if you’re into a bit of development and happen to be a JS oriented person, is a boat load of fun. It’s easy to hack on, the maintainer is a real force for positivity in the web world and at the end of the day it pukes out HTML, CSS and as much JS as you’re into (which could be none).

I also ran into some strange permissions issues that I could never permanently fix. This is what ultimately prompted the entire move to Netlify, which as it turns out was my real motivation, not a redesign or replatforming. Now, each change pushed to the site’s repository triggers a rebuild and pushes all of the assets to Netlify’s infrastructure/CDN. That keeps the site rendering quickly and reduces the amount of server management for me. Win-win as far as I’m concerned.

There’ll be more to come on the design and development front, but I just wanted to make note that the site is a changin’.