Random thoughts designing hluska.ca
Somewhere in the middle of installing UIkit and setting up my scss pipeline, I started to reflect on all the changes that this website has gone through over the years. From static HTML, to Mambo, Joomla and Wordpress and then into Hugo (and back to static HTML) I have done it all here. But this time, it feels different.
Deploying a static site (properly) involves a few things. I use the excellent DigitalOcean App Platform to host my static sites and it works great. But between SCSS and a sprinkle of javascript (with all the node_modules that come with it), I have to go through a build step before I can publish a new blog article. It’s easy enough to set up and every tool I use has excellent documentation (or I wouldn’t be smart enough to use it), but it’s easy enough for me to set up and I have a lot of years of experience setting up these kinds of things. It makes me wonder about less technical people.
Is it any wonder so many people use services like Wix and Squarespace to host their websites? Can we as an industry do better or should we leave it to those services?
Wordpress seemed like a solution for a long time and I’m still tangentially involved in the wider Wordpress community. But as security threats have evolved, hosting your own Wordpress site has grown to take a very specialized set of skills. And while there are services available that host Wordpress sites for people, they’re costly enough that they’re Wix/Squarespace competitors. And when you put Wordpress up against either of those tools, its flexibility shines but that’s the best thing I can say about it.
My big requirements for this website are that I want it to be easy to read, fast and I want each page to be extremely small.
As I struggle with design, it makes me really wonder about the kinds of people who are really good at making things look good. All my designs tend to look a little off, but some people can add an incredible polish to everything they do. And as I struggle with design, I sure have a lot of respect for them. I can’t imagine the time or frustration it takes to get incredibly good at this stuff.
I’ve been listening to Diiv’s new album (Frog in Boiling Water) a lot lately. I’ll admit that I didn’t like it much the first time I listened to it, but as I’ve listened to it more, I’ve started to consider it among their best. There’s something very raw and gritty about it that their other albums (while also amazing) this just didn’t have.