Site Relaunch

After a long hiatus, I finally brought my personal website back to the internet. This time, no WordPress, no Drupal. I wanted to use a bare, static site generator. No admin UI. No continuous march of plugin updates. Just a repository of text files. I’m using Astro.js, which is far more advanced than generators I’ve used in the past in that you can seamlessly integrate with UI frameworks like React to build more complex sites. None of that here, though.

I wrote more about my decision to bring this site back on my Colophon page, so I won’t repeat that here.

I’m still actively building this site out. Notably:

• My Photography galleries are taking shape. Part of the process is going through all my digital backups, refreshing them, and rediscovering images that I want to share online. I expect to add a lot more, and probably will take down some that are just placeholders. I’ve spent nearly two decades posting almost exclusively to Instagram, which I’ll continue to do, but I find that photographing “for” Instagram is a bit limiting artistically.
• I am building out the Projects section of my site. I started doing this in WordPress years ago, just before I pulled the plug on my site. I always enjoyed exploring sites with lots of creative output from designers, web developers, and artists. The majority of my output lives behind corporate firewalls and confidentiality agreements, so I’ve never had much of a portfolio to share interactively. This lets me share some tangible efforts.
• I will slowly bring back some old Blog posts, but I have no intention of bringing back all of it. Just useful content that fits in with the digital garden concept. I don’t really care to resurrect all my random nonsense.
• The Notebooks section is an exciting addition based on my interest in documentation, and similar work I’ve done for clients. I have a lot of content I’d like to build out here on various topics, but it will be a long process. The Site Instruction Manual is a demo of what I can build here, and will serve a purpose for me as build the site. I’d like to add more notebooks that will be useful for other people.
• I’ve got a lot of accessibility improvements to make. I thought I handled most of it pretty well before launching, but online tools have revealed a bit more ground to cover. So I will roll my sleeves up and get to work on that.
• There are a lot of Links that I need to add.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I will eventually migrate this platform to my other sites.