Site Update
Published on:
For many, many years this site has been displaying the single line of text “Nothing to see here!” while in the background acting as a place to host various random files. I’ve finally gotten round to rebuilding it and starting to add some actual content.
Why the change?
I’m always experimenting with new web technologies, especially new frontend frameworks and this site was mostly a test for that. A single line of text however does not make for a very good test and isn’t exactly great as far as web presence goes either. I did gain some useful insights into what a framework brings along before you start adding any content (Framework Comparison), but ultimately that wasn’t a very fair test so I thought I should make something a bit more realistic.
The New Setup
The previous version of this site was built using Svelte and Sapper following the investigation into various frameworks mentioned previously. At the time they were the most interesting and came out on top as far as performance goes. I have however found Svelte to be a bit frustrating in some of the ways it works, mostly the enforced one component per file structure, whereas as I like to sometimes have sub-components within a file when they don’t deserve to stand on their own. A few more optimised frameworks are also starting to show up and establish themselves.
This new version, as mentioned briefly in my Projects page, uses Astro as the framework, which so far I’ve found very nice to work with. It also uses Preact for the few components I have so I get to keep the JSX goodness and multiple components per file structure I missed. A nice extra bonus is being able to create some pages, like this post, using markdown, which I find much easier for quickly jotting something down.
More To Come
Now I’ve built an actual site I hope to update it with various additions over time. Hopefully I’ll manage to pop out the occasional post, add a few more projects, and maybe some other bits and pieces of information people might find useful, time will tell there.