I updated my site design and layout - welcome to v5

Welcome to version 5 of my site, obsolete29.com! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here are my thoughts about some of the design decisions.

Still a static site #

I love static websites. Every version of my site since 2017 has been a static site. My static site generator of choice is still Eleventy (opens in a new tab). I took this opportunity to re-implement how I was doing the responsive image processing during build. I'm still using eleventy-img (opens in a new tab) but previous versions of my implementation was pretty hacky and non-standard. I went ahead and implemented the out of the box, documented template (opens in a new tab) and I feel this helps future proof me a bit. This change means I had to go back through my posts with images to update the short codes. Because of that, I decided to archive old posts. I now only have the last two years published. I may come back and republish the old posts but I'm undecided at this time.

Minimalist design #

I'm attracted to minimalist web designs and I'm pretty happy with how this version of the site came out. I think of it as developer minimalist. I love this color scheme so I'm using it in this version of the site as well. The colors are based loosely on what's used by Feedbin (opens in a new tab) that I added a pop of green color to.

I'm experimenting with using different font families to distinguish headers vs body text vs system text. I'm still using web safe fonts (the Pimp my Type (opens in a new tab) guy would not be happy!) because I still can't quite bring myself to use custom fonts and having those extra web calls. I want the site to be lightning fast. I reserve the right to change to custom fonts though!

Caddy web server #

I'm still hosting my site on a VPS at Capsul (opens in a new tab). Instead of using Apache to serve the site, I wanted to switch over to Caddy (opens in a new tab). It's supposed to be easy to install and configure and I can attest that it is! I was struggling at first because I was trying to make it too complicated. I thought I had to udpate Linux permission settings on files and folders but it's literally this easy:

• Install the software (opens in a new tab)
• Add a configuration file (opens in a new tab)
• Swing your DNS name to the new IP address.
• Done.

The HTTPS certificate was already setup and ready when the DNS change propagated.

Conclusion #

Again, I'm pretty happy with how the site came out during this revision. I may explore using custom fonts. I also want to build some helper scripts to manage the posting workflow.

What do you think? What are some of your favorite site designs and layouts?