Well, Squarespace, we had a good run. You’re probably the best consumer-oriented CMS on the market. Your ease of use is unquestionable, and you do drag-and-drop better than anyone else I’ve ever seen.
But I’m a developer, dammit, and I don’t need to pay you guys $20 a month to house my work in a restrictive template when I could code a cooler website myself in no time.
Me realizing how much money I’ve paid Squarespace since 2013
And when I say “no time” I mean about three months, apparently? I started putting this site together in May (on a plane) and worked on it sporadically. Now it’s August, and I will not get billed by Squarespace again.
So welcome to my new website!
I thought it’d be fun to see what goes into coding a portfolio site and what I could do with it. I probably spent the majority of my dev time on the lightbox component, which I’m sure could’ve been engineered a little more efficiently, but whatever! I think it’s a pretty slick experience, and I’ll improve on the code over time. Will add support for swipe gestures and arrow keys later on.
This site is hosted on Github Pages, built with Jekyll/Liquid, and runs on HTML5, SCSS, and jQuery (thanks Google ajax). Every single line of code was lovingly written by yours truly, utilizing an incomplete version of a very, very simple framework/component library I’ve been putting together at Adaptiva. You can see all the code in my Github repo.
I prioritized performance and efficiency throughout the codebase. HTTP requests are kept to a minimum, images are lazy loaded after the DOM, and the lightbox images aren’t loaded until they’re needed and are sized responsibly (surprisingly rare in portfolio sites.) I even made a solid effort at keeping nesting to a reasonable minimum in my stylesheets to avoid inefficient compilations to CSS.
Plus, since this a statically generated site being served over a CDN (thanks Cloudflare ), it’s inherently fast as hell. Performance-minded dev can only help to improve on that speed.
This is also somewhat of a clean slate for me. At this point in my life, I feel like I can put up only the work that I like, rather than work I think might get me hired for something. I can write whatever and whenever I want in this journal/blog thing, so I think I’ll do just that.
I’ll post new work here if I’m particularly stoked about it, and I’ll post random thoughts, sketches, life updates, and whatever else I feel like sharing here, too. I have ideas for some content I’d like to create, and being able to code a custom interface to host it would be nice.
Idk, maybe I’ll add a subscription component to this journal if I actually use it enough. Baby steps.
Follow me on Twitter in the meantime.
Thanks for reading. (: