Websites are so complicated, so I made a dumb site.
🗓Websites are great, I really love them -- they're a huge part of my life professionally and I've always spent a lot of my personal time on the line. I really appreciate good design and function -- but -- I also feel really tired by it all at times.
Every site online seems like it's filled with analytics, tracking scripts/pixels, social feeds, animations, and all kinds of other bloat.
Even personal sites that are not intended to be monetized get loaded up with all that jazz, it's just the default.
People love looking at numbers, conversion, split testing results and all that -- and yes -- I am very aware that me writing this is pretty rich since I contribute to all of that on the daily, but it's true.
Whenever I tried to have a site in the past I got bogged down in all of that - and - I'd treat every post like it was some sort of informational post trying to generate traffic, even though none of that ever mattered. It's just kind of where my mind always goes.
So I decided to ditch my WordPress site -- which I rarely used -- and instead replace it with a basic static site that doesn't do much. There's no fancy scripts, no smart features, it's pretty much just HTML/CSS, a simplistic color palette, and a minor abundance of emoji for fun.
The site is built with 11ty to make ongoing management easy and published (for free!) on Cloudflare Pages because I'm cheap - and - it was actually pretty easy, also I really like Cloudflare as a company. I'm not here to convince you why 11ty is the best Static Site Generator or why Cloudflare is better than Netlify, it just happens to be the route I went with.
I put the whole thing together in just a few hours, purged most of my old content, and then went from there.
Let's see if this is something that I'll actually use, I have a feeling the reason I never wrote before was because of all the complexity and feeling like every post needed to serve a purpose. This pretty much eradicates all of that.
The bar is pretty low though, since it looks like I only wrote about once a year -- if that -- in the past. 😉
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