Website

2026-02-02

Improvements

This post tracks the improvements and changes that I have planned to this site.

Priority

  • Mobile support: Right now, there has not been much thought put into how the site may appear on a mobile device. That’s a priority. (I know the Home page looks atrocious on mobile)
  • Consolidation of CSS, and Dark Theme: CSS is currently stuck with each component, for the most part, this works just fine, since each component decides itself. However, color specifically I feel should be moved to a global file, to ensure consistency, and make updating the color of my site not a pain. This leads easily into adding a dark theme.
  • Links: Right now the main page contains a links area. This is redundant. While I enjoy the visually seperated main page, I think the Links section should be replaced by a navigation tree. A visual display of the mapping of the site, to give users an immediate understanding of how the site is layed out.
  • Clickable Cards: Right now the cards are done through href, and only the text is clickable. This is not the expected way of handling clicks in the modern day. They should be updated such that the whole card, is clickable.
  • Get rid of the Astro default favicon. It’s fine for now, but I should find something that represents me better.

Nice to Have:

  • Integration of common dynamic features. My projects list, while it works well, is an area I believe that user expectations may clash with. Moving to a new page for each project may be unexpected, and a dynamic update on the same page may be better suited. Needs to be considered, as I do like the simplistic nature of this.
  • Updating navigation: Right now my biggest issue with the projects linking to a new page is that it can be easy to get ‘lost’. Once you’re on a project page there is no indication where you came from, and no way to get back. While the navigation bar at the bottom ensures you can always return home, and the small size of the website means this is not a huge concern, it still is a concern. I want to update the navigation in some manner to leave a better ‘bread crumb trail’ through my site.

2026-02-01

Finally got the website to a point where I’m willing to deploy it. Still want to add a lot more to it, iron out some of the wrinkles, and get some additional polish in. But it’s tolerable now. The links go to the places where I want them to, the pages are constructed in a quasi-reasonable manner, at least on wider screens. Very happy having chosen Astro so far. Haven’t had any reason to use Preact yet, but I imagine some of that aforementioned polish might be using it.

Either way, I’ll leave it here to settle for a bit, the next update will hopefully get the cards and buttons working like most people probably expect them to work. A theme overhaul is planned for soon as well, which will bring a dark theme, as well as unifying all of the various colors I’m using.

2026-01-27

Wanted somewhere I could document my progession on projects, as well as host a couple of other useful things. Figured it was finally time to get a website of my own up and running.

Needed to decide on technologies to use, and went with Astro.js for most things, and then Preact for any dynamic interaction that may need to be done.

Astro.js was chosen because its designed to ship as little javascript as possible, rendering as much as it can when it generates. For a static website, this is perfect. It gives me the flexibilty of dynamically constructed pages without having to make the client do any of that work.

Some other options I considered but decided against were plain HTML + CSS, seemed too fickle, and didn’t give me any experience with new UI frameworks. I also decided against Scully, which is a static site generator that runs off of Angular. While I have experience with Angular, it seems illogical to me to use angular, which is decidedly a dynamic framework, and then ‘bring it down’ to a static site. Better, in my opinion, to use something designed for the task. Preact was chosen over React because all React is valid Preact, and a framework focused more on a small footprint makes sense when I’m using Astro, which is designed to ship as little javascript as possible.

That gives me my baseline, time to get to work.