I am a fan of personal websites. I kind of think that everyone should have one – or at least everyone who is engaged with the online world should have one. It doesn’t have to be complicated. A single page with a brief introduction to who you are and some relevant links can be enough.

Having a simple personal home on the Internet is also very much in the spirit of the open web. A return to the culture of the early days of the World Wide Web. Back before the big platforms attempted to capture and monetise everyone. The days when everyone, if they wanted, could have a Geocities page stuffed with animated GIFs. Yes, I have reached the point where I am nostalgic for those annoying dancing animals, colour clashing backgrounds, and headings written in Comic Sans. Isn’t that preferable to the constant adverts (and occasional Nazis) interrupting your social feeds?

I’ve had a blog (this being the current iteration) for almost my entire adult life. In that time I’ve experimented with different ways of creating posts – and feeding content to and from the blog. But the usual pattern has been short periods of regular posting followed by long periods of very intermittent posts. But even with one or two posts a year, I have had my little home on the web.

I am currently in a place where I want to be more active publishing online – essentially I am encouraging myself to write more – but am finding aspects of having a “blog” restrictive. The framework of an ongoing online journal not really fitting with the kind of long-form analytical content I have an urge to work on. So I came to the conclusion that I needed a personal website that worked a bit differently. This was partly inspired by coming across the concept of the digital garden. An approach where items of content are “planted” in an early unfinished form and then are returned to and worked on over time so that they “grow” into a more finished state. (A good explanation of digital gardens can be found here: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden)

I’ve also been wanting to explore some new web technologies. Or more accurately new approaches to the old technologies of plain HTML and CSS. This blog, and most of the websites I’ve ever been involved with, have been built with WordPress. I remain a huge fan of WordPress. But in recent years the WordPress project has been going in directions I haven’t been entirely comfortable with. I’ve also become convinced that in many cases the best option for publishing a website is to use static pages. So I have been looking at static website generators, in particular Eleventy.

So this all ended up with me deciding I needed to create a new personal website. It would give me a chance to think about a format and structure that would enable me to publish the kind of writing that I want to work on. It would also give me a project to work on that would let me flex my HTML/CSS skills and learn how to use Eleventy properly.

The need to use a substantial amount of annual leave has given me some free time to do some coding over the last few weeks. (I have done other holiday things as well!) I have managed to make a very pleasing amount of progress which has resulted in a new website I have published at: andystrange.uk

It is very much still a work-in-progress. Whilst I have been able to build the framework of the website I’ve not really had time to fill it with much content. So there are lots of “Some content to go here…” statements. But I wanted to get something online fairly quickly so that I could begin to “grow” it in the future.

I am still keeping this blog however. I did look at ways to move the content that lives here from WordPress into Eleventy. But the effort and technical complications didn’t seem worth it. So I am continuing to put blog posts here and other content on the new site. But I have done a couple of things to integrate the two so the user experience is more or less that of a single site. It also means I can carry on using the WordPress UI for writing blog posts. Whilst I enjoy writing in Markdown there are some aspects of writing a post that just work better in WordPress.

Hopefully, I will be able to flesh it out with some more content soon and maybe add some additional features. I may write a bit more about how I built the website. But if you want to know more about the tech it is built on I have written a short colophon.