New Wonderland Has Been Born

Another year, another Wonderland revamp! (honestly, it's not even been a year) This time with a bolder, more extensive design.

If you've missed the previous iterations of the Wonderland...well lucky you! It's never a good idea to look into the past.

Anyhow, it's a new Wonderland, so I need to write an obligatory article about how I've made it. I have considered using plain HTML and CSS without any preprocessors or generators, but I discovered that I do indeed value my time and sanity which lead me to choosing 11ty.

11ty

11ty is a static site generator that offers many features to make your web development experience considerably less painful. You can write your pages in markdown, avoid repeating code with templates, and if you find something missing, you can install it with a plugin. I won't cover it in depth here, so if you are curious, be sure to visit their website.

But to give a few examples, that "Contents" section in the top left of every article? That is generated with an 11ty plugin. I don't have to write it myself, it scans through the page, finds all HTML heading elements, assigns them IDs and builts a table of contents according to my styling. Or the blog page that lists all of my posts; that is also auto generated based on all files saved in a particular directory. They don't even have to be of the same kind! You can mix and match HTML and markdown files however you like. Each post then contains meta information (such as a title, description, publish date) which 11ty uses to build each entry. This can be also seen on the home page in the "Latest Posts" section.

But apart from 11ty, this site is pure HTML and CSS with no javascript or any other unnecessary bloat (at least not on the front end, which is what really matters).

Hosting

To host everything, I use the Caddy web server software. It takes care of much of the things that tend to cause pain, such as getting a SSL certificate and renewing it for me automatically, or redirecting all http requests to https. It is also stupidly easy to configure.

Next, Caddy runs on my 2011 Mac Mini, which, apart from this site, serves all my other web related projects. It's an old guy but still surprisingly useful nowadays, especially for hosting a few web pages.

By the way, this isn't the only computer I own. If you're curious, visit my computer collection!

Simple Place

Over all, the Wonderland is a simple place where I can express my creativity (or lack thereof) and build my own things. It's not going to be a super busy place, but I'll try to update it regularly, if not for anything else then at least for my sake.

Cross your fingers there won't be another revamp in 2 weeks!