This Blog Is About You

In early 2021, Jan was looking to start a blog. She approached me, not really knowing much of what she wanted. As I normally do, I asked her to send me some links to sites that she liked. Based on what she sent me, I could tell she was looking for something clean and minimal. And that's what I think I delivered! I did have some fun with the fancy dot that's on the front page and the header.

I was working with Next.js a lot at this point, but I felt that it was a little much for a completely static blog. Jan needed to be able to add content, of course, but there was no actual dynamic content — only the blog posts that she was writing.

This was the project that got me exploring static site generators more seriously, and I eventually found — and fell in love with — Eleventy. It is a such a joy to work with. I had already completed the project using Next, but I decided to redo it with Eleventy. I'm so glad I did, because 11ty has become my goto for static sites.

The frontend is hosted on Netlify, and the CMS is GraphCMS (now Hygraph). The frontend stack is pure HTML, vanilla Javascript and Sass — no libraries whatsoever.

I also wrote a custom plugin so that Jan could write captions for the images, and they would be semantically correct for screen readers etc. — but also styled nicely.