This is the second iteration of my website.

It was mostly inspired by the websites of Brandur Leach and Mark McGranaghan. I used the Tailwind CSS framework building it with Hugo. It’s hosted on Netlify.

The style is influenced by academics' websites where simplicity is prized, but a touch of minimal design helps. I’ve also been influenced by Butterick’s Practical Typography.

In building the website I wanted foremost a website that is:

1. Impervious to stylistic changes over time, simple enough that it can suit any time.
2. Simple, easy to maintain. This led to it being static.
3. Cheap to serve.
4. Unlikely to be lost.

Mistakes I’ve probably made made:

1. Using Tailwind, which is a relatively new framework, and has limited customisation. My inexperience with CSS means I’ll probably have to fix parts of the styling in the future, but for now I’ve enjoyed learning Tailwind and adapting it with Hugo.
2. I failed to deploy the site to AWS S3. I planned to serve it with CloudFront, as per the principles of the intrinsic static site, however configuring the DNS and routing with Google Domains too was too much.
3. Not using a totally custom deployment scheme, opting for Hugo. I tried the former, but it was too much work for now.

My old website was served using GitHub pages using Jami Gibbs' template which she very kindly makes available for others. The main crime was my inability to figure out how to make posts available as separate pages. Otherwise, the style didn’t quite suit me, I never really put in the work to learn Jekyll & Bootstrap, and it was built using Ruby, which I don’t know, compared to Hugo which is written in Go, which I do know.

Please let me know if you see any strange formatting on any of your devices.