This Site

Last Updated: 2024-05-29

This website is pretty small, but it's not the smallest website I've ever made. Here's a quick list of the technologies I'm using, and why:

• Express — Because I wanted to use a template for the navbar.
• Sakura — Because I wanted my text to be readable.
• Vercel — Because I wanted a painless deploy process.
• Mailgun — Because I wanted people to email me.

I only introduce a new piece of tech when I have a specific problem to solve, and I do as little as reasonably possible to solve that problem. This means I have some stupid design choices that you probably wouldn't make if you did everything correctly from the start:

• I have a static site, but it's being served from a server app. I could build the site before hand and save on server costs. I haven't done that because I have very little traffic, and thus no server costs.
• I'm delivering blog-style content, yet my navigation is just a flat list of pages. I also have no tagging information, or publication dates (as I wrote this I decided to just manually set publication dates). I haven't organized my content better because there isn't yet enough of it to warrant organizing.

I'm telling you this to demonstrate how I think about making things.

I can only be productive if I am solving a specific problem. I could muddle through standing up a React.js site with Tailwind CSS and Plausible Analytics, and maybe a dozen other tools besides, but without a compelling reason to use those technologies, my end result wouldn't be any cleaner than this tech stack is.

I'm a big believer in incremental improvements, and a big proponent of effectively prioritizing work. I don't have the time or self-discipline to sit around maintaining a giant tech stack. I identify the most pressing problem that is bothering me, and figure out the most effective solution for it right now, and that's what I make next.

So the secret reason I have a page dedicated to "how I made a bare HTML website" is because I wanted to show off my philosophy about getting things done. :)

If the plainness of this website hurts you, I can totally sympathize. I would invite you to tell me all about it.