This Website

Well, here it is, I made a little website for little old me. The primary purpose on paper is to have a space to host a blog (where you are probably reading this) and whatever else I might do in the future, but really the purpose was to just get a little bit of exposure in some frontend development and to waste a little bit of time (which has been a huge success!).

Implementation

I knew basically zero about anything html/css/frontend whatsoever before making this website. From some minimal research on different frontend frameworks, I chose to use SvelteKit, primarily because it has some nice tutorials that I was able to follow pretty closely (see this blog post by Josh Collinsworth) and because it has support for rendering markdown pages, which I wanted to be able to easily write posts without worrying too much about formatting. In my snooping, I read a friend’s website (bedouch.net), which made it seem pretty easy to work with. But maybe my perception of it as easy is just from a lack of experience in any other frontend frameworks – the grass might be greener in a different pasture, and my little bovine brain is none the wiser. There did turn out to be some friction points with svelte, e.g. dynamic asset imports, which were a pain to work with…

I also wanted to explore how websites are hosted. I ended up choosing Cloudflare to host this site, primarily because they have a free tier, easy integrations with github (where I keep the source code for the site), and straight-forward email routing. Again, my simpleton bovine brain might just be ignorant of what could be possible in a different pasture.

I started by trying to just make all of the styling myself by writing my own css sheets, which was successful before I checked what it looked like on mobile (it looked bad on mobile). This inspired me to come up with my original, proprietary idea – mobile first development. I ended up using Bootstrap to create most of the style on the site.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it has turned out, not that it is really done – I’m sure I’ll add other things here or there. If you have any suggestions on things I should do, feel free to email me.

As a reward for any human soul that somehow ended up here and chose to read this, here is a fun picture I took of a chicken that I named Peter:

And here is Peter’s favorite song (I asked):