It's actually been several years since I've had anything besides a single placeholder page with a scrap of text online for myself. Building this site was an attempt to get some more hands-on experience with technology that I've been enjoying and some aspects of stuff that interest me but in some cases I haven't been able to be as strongly focused on as I'd like to be.
The site is built using...
- Nuxt.js, an application and site-building framework.
- Vue.js, a JavaScript framework (that Nuxt is built on top of)
- NetlifyCMS, an open source content management app that writes static files (that can be consumed by the Nuxt content module) and manages publishing via Git.
- Netlify for running the build scripts to generate and host static files when there's changes in Git (either code changes on my part, or content changes from NetlifyCMS).
- Tailwind CSS was a bit of a wildcard include. I've got a LONG history of writing CSS anyway, but I wanted to experiment a bit with a utility framework that was not going to be as opinionated as bootstrap. (Also, I put my design brain in storage a long long time ago. So being able to just hijack their color palette for everything was a big help.)
- Plausible analytics because having some basic analytics is nice, and I really don't need the overhead (or privacy concerns) that come along with Google Analytics for a site this small.
- Request Metrics for doing some ongoing monitoring of performance and loading behaviors.
- Most of the SVG icons are courtesy of Heroicons and the topographic map background is taken from their sister site Hero Patterns.
- Some photos and the homepage video are free stock media from Pexels.com.
A couple of the things I definitely wanted to experiment with a bit were...
- Setting up an alternate dark mode color palette (which was super easy once I found out how to enable it in the nuxt/tailwind module).
- Trying to juice up the site performance and Core Web Vitals for the site.
Things are humming along nicely, but there are a couple of things I'd like to modify in the future once some of the other projects I've been leaning on (like @nuxt/image) get a couple more options into place.