After a few years of letting my previous website do the work of showcasing my past and current projects it is time for something new once again. After a much too long time of thinking, planning, rethinking & planning again, let me introduce you to my 2017, nay, 2018 website.
While the previous edition(s) of this site presented you with large amounts of images and detailed chronological timelines of projects I have been working on, the updated site takes a slightly more reduced approach.
In the past, I used to think of my website as a (0,0) coordinate of my web presence where I tried to aggregate everything I was doing online. While this, one the one hand, can be convenient for the visitor, it might also be a bit overwhelming on the other. Additionally, it made it hard to focus on the really relevant things.
This time around, the site is a decent bit more clean and stripped down. My portfolio will be presented in a decentralized fashion using preexisting communities like Github for code, Dribbble for design work and Twitter for random thoughts.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the stuff you’re probably really here for:
Let me tell you a story about the tools and technologies driving this site.
Well…there is no CMS. While my previous sites were build and running on Kirby CMS (which btw. I still ❤️ and haven’t turned my back to), this time I choose to try something new. Something even more reduced and lightweight. One of these fancy-schmanzy static site generators the cool kids are using nowadays.
After working with Laravel a lot in the last year or two (or even more) and diving deeper and deeper into its surrounding community, I couldn’t help but notice Tighten announcing the stable release of their PHP-based static site generator Jigsaw. You see, the nice thing about Jigsaw is that it uses the same templating engine/language Laravel is using: Blade. This allows for incredibly powerful and flexible templates. The content though is hold in a set of markdown files. Nothing new to learn about here.
The styles, even though being limited to a minimum here, have been written in plain CSS with a little help of Tailwind. A set of custom written npm scripts ties together the whole build process. In detail: building the site consists of running PostCSS (which will build, autoprefix and minify the CSS code), Jigsaw (to turn templates and content into static HTML files), PurgeCSS (to get rid of unused CSS code) and Workbox (to automatically generate a service worker for the site).
The end result is a lightning fast static website with a tiny amount of CSS (~2kb, minified and gzipped).
This website is fully functional, even when you're offline. Well, to be honest, this is true under two conditions: (1) you have already visited this site at least once and (2) you're using a modern browser that supports service workers.
Wanna know more about any of the points mentioned above? No problemo, sir. Or madame. Just hit me up on Twitter!