A new blog

It’s been a long time since I’ve had an actively-maintained personal website/blog, but I got a spurt of inspiration after seeing a few other recently-revamped blogs. What better way to celebrate the end of the year than with… a blog?

My intention is to try and write a post on here relatively frequently, but we’ll see how that goes as I’m quite out of practice.

Tech stack

I wanted this website to achieve three things: be of my own design, be easy to update, and be accessible. To that end, I chose a relatively simple tech stack:

• Eleventy
• HTML
• CSS

And that’s… just about it. Eleventy gives me more than enough functionality to write simple blog posts in Markdown, convert them to HTML, and display them on a page.

I did start out using Tailwind, but after a little while and seeing some of the recent discourse around it, I decided I wanted to write all the styles myself from scratch. It was pretty easy to remove Tailwind from the stack, as I hadn’t done too much work on it to begin with. Plus, it meant that I could get rid of PostCSS, which was giving me a headache when trying to serve both PostCSS and Eleventy at the same time.

I deployed the site using Netlify. It was my first time using it, and to be honest I’m pretty impressed by how quickly I was able to get things up and running. It took maybe 3 minutes from signing up to getting a version of the site deployed (pointing the domain took longer thanks to pesky DNS propagation times).

Accessibility and Performance

I wanted some assurance that my website would be accessible, so I regularly tested my pages with axe DevTools and Lighthouse in Chrome.

At the time of writing, there are no accessibility issues reported by Axe or Lighthouse, so that’s a win!

If anybody reading this does in fact spot or experience an accessibility issue, please send me a DM or tweet on Twitter.