Rebuild for a reason and let that reason be…

This is the current rebuild of my site, click to see the Old version (before you tell me I know that the url is new.letorey.co.uk that is because the ssl certificate works for this but not old).

Two things happened today (1 April 2024):

I listened to episode 609 of Shoptalk Show
Second I read Don't modernize your code just for the heck of it.

I'm a big fan of both the podcast and Chris's daily developer newsletter.

Today the kind of both told a similar message. Shoptalk show had Blake Watson as a guest, a few things that Blake said stood out:

Use the stuff you know, if you're a jQuery expert use jQuery
The one new thing. Do one new thing at a time don't try and learn SASS, Astro, just try to do 1 new thing at a time.

Chris pointed out that on Pull Requests they do 1 thing at a time and this means if something goes wrong then you know that the problem is with that 1 thing. If you try and do multiple things at the same time then you have the added headache that you need to find out which of the things went wrong.

In Chris's newsletter, he explains that he started replacing SASS for CSS variables, then realised that he was just doing it for the reason that it is newer and for no other reason.

So why am I rebuilding

Learning

First and foremost I want to learn how to do things and put into practice the things that I am learning in my day job, writing documentation for the web on MDN.

Change stack

I used to work for Squiz and they built a CMS called Squiz Matrix, it is a very large, complex and robust content management system and I built my own blog/site using it so that I could learn more about using it. It is totally over the top for a tiny blog with a few pages. So I have chosen to build in 11ty, which I have used before but want to learn more about it's capabilities. Also moving to a new stack will reduce my monthly costs.

Social Media

I really dislike social media and over a year ago I pretty much left Facebook, there are reasons I still have an account but I just don't use it and post there any longer.

Just over a year ago Musk completely broke twitter, in my opinion.

These silos should not own my content I should and if I want then I can share my content with them I can. If they go away then my content doesn't. This concept is referred to as indieweb and soon(ish) I shall enable my blog to share to these other places rather than me posting all over the place.