Under the hood

Published on May 03, 2025

It used to be, a “redesign” was mostly cosmetic around here. New colors, new layout, new typefaces.

But this is a bottom-up re-imagining of everything I want to do here. Timeline-ordered blogging is gone, replaced with a more digital-garden style of approach consistent with the Perpetual Beta.

And gone, too, is the overkill of PHP-driven, database-pumping dynamic page generation, replaced with swift, smooth, static files.

My engine of choice is 11ty. It might take me a while to add all the features I’ll eventually want to see here, but as I do, you won’t notice any more weight or drag.

I plan to keep a mostly flat directory structure. Pretty much everything will hang directly off the domain root, except for a few backend files like CSS and other assets.

I’ll start with maybe three or four eleventy templates—.njk files—for basic layout and gradually add style.

As I add more stuff, I’ll go into more detail here.

Update: May 6, 2025

So I pushed the site from laptop to server. It’s by no means done, but no longer too embarrassing to release.

I tweaked the front page and made sure all the other page layouts worked.