Shamelessly stolen from a dear friend, I thought an apt first post on this site would be the creation of a colophon, of sorts. For those not familiar with the term:
Colophon (n.) - An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication.
This will not be nearly so professional as that - instead, I expect it to be more of a chronicle of my development endeavors.
This site was, until very recently, completely handwritten. The files I typed up were the ones that were served by my host. I did this intentionally - I have grown very weary of single page applications and mountains of JS slowing down sites. I get more than enough of that in my day job - I would prefer my personal projects to be lightweight and elegant. I am very happy with how little JS I have used in this site; several pages employ no JS at all, and the others mostly just use it for tracking more complex mouse interactions.
Of course, manually maintaining a blog in this fashion quickly becomes burdensome - so I have acquiesced somewhat and conscripted Zola as my static site generator. There are several dead branches of my repo with attempts to try 11ty and Astro, but these both failed to allow me to maintain the file structure I wanted, where the markdown content and html templates could coexist in the same directory. I don't fault any of these generators for failing to allow this - but given the fact that most of my pages involve large amounts of one-off, custom HTML, I would vastly prefer to keep my templates alongside my content. Even Zola fails to allow this by default - in a move that has been described by friends as "gross" and "one way to do it", I had to simlink my templates folder to my content folder to get it to play nice.
All in all, though, I think this site is shaping up quite nicely. I have a laundry list of things I'd like to add someday, but that's for another time, and another post.