This is the fourth iteration of my site (yes, the current version in the header does not reflect that). The driving force behind this rewrite is a desire to create something from the base up, without using some framework to eliminate the heavy lifting. Previous iterations of the site have used Foundation, themes, or have been based very heavily on other people’s sites. This time I would like to make something that reflects my own vision (without compromises made due to the framework I am using) and that is representative of my ability (whatever that may be).
The general idea for my site is pretty simple. It will be a place for me to post about whatever. Previously, I had incorporated sections with guides and progress updates on various games, series, and books I was working through at the time. This became too much to maintain, especially due to how restrictive the basic version of Jekyll that comes with Github Pages is. The goal with this site is to automate a lot of the site organization while reducing the amount that I personally have to maintain. Categories will have indexes with pagination to allow for readers to quickly browse the content they are interested in. But on my end, everything will go into posts and I won’t have to think about it much more than that. More importantly, the less manual configuration I have in the YAML frontmatter of pages, the better behaved the site is under massive style changes, which means I can experiment more with how the site looks.
The one notable exception to this is the music-review portion of the site (which I won’t make incredibly visible, but is there). I do not claim to be an expert in music. I definitely don’t expect anybody to take my opinions seriously. But listening to music is my flavor-of-the-month interest, and I enjoy documenting these things. I don’t expect this to be nearly as hard to maintain as the ambitious HLTB portion of the site because unlike books, games, and series, albums are relatively quick to listen to and I can relisten several times in order to form a reasonable opinion. I also have set the standard relatively low for what I want to discuss: mostly favorite and least-favorite tracks, album concepts I liked, and random thoughts. It will not be comprehensive. It will not be very formal. And I won’t score things (probably). And this, I think, will make it easy for me to feel like maintaining it, especially since I do this for albums I listen to already.
Another key aspect of the site rewrite is how I will focus on tech and efficiency. These are two different ideas, but I think they are pretty connected. As you may have already seen, much of this site is minified to optimize loading times. This is done via plugins that compact written and generated HTML, CSS, and JS. Similarly, I intend to add service workers to the site, which I believe should function like a self-managed cache. As I learn more about service workers, I may find that that understanding is completely wrong, but for now I’ll choose to believe that they will further optimize the experience readers have on my site. The important point here is that I will make a strong effort to keep the site lean, and I will research and incorperate tech that allows me to do this better (maybe even get my hands dirty and do some work myself).
Currently, the site has no styling beyond what normalize.css offers. My first order of business is to change that. I have appropriate wrappers in place in my layouts that should make styling straight-forward. If I do find that the HTML I have written is not enough, I think I’ve modularized my approach well enough that I should be able to swiftly make the appropriate adjustments.
Future efforts will include: automatic image optimization (especially for album art that may be far too large for the way the site presents it); service workers; and adding content (mostly blog posts, the about page, a nice home page). I also may look into registering a domain. I do quite like the name “Renormalized”, as it ties both into my research field and can be stretched to apply to my idea for the site (I may explain this in a blog post at some point).
And so comes to an end the first post on the new site. If you do follow the site, look to the dev category for more updates. Hopefully, the lifetime of this site iteration is much longer than that of previous ones.