DarZouras.com Updated

It's day one of a four day weekend and I'm neck deep in the rebuild of my personal website. Just in case you haven't seen it before the rebuild, this is what you were missing:

DarZouras.com before the rebuild

As I'm writing this blog post there are a few things that I've already added based on my time at An Event Apart Chicago:

  • I'm using CSS variables!!! I can't believe I went so long not knowing about them. They're so cool and I can't wait to use them for work.
  • I've added a Service Worker and manifest!! SW is a little bit buggy still, I'm working on improving it. I haven't been able to get the page to successfully load while offline yet so I'm still working on it. I would like to build a page for offline purposes only.
  • I'm using a variable font!! Right now I'm working with Public Sans but I'm considering switching to something that has variant options besides just the weight.

Of course the layout itself is updated- I've been playing with this style since I built a test site using Gatsby. I liked Gatsby a lot but I ultimately decided to pass on it as a builder to use with NetlifyCMS because GraphQL doesn't play well with optional fields. Pretty lame!

In the previous post I outlined that I wanted to also build using a design system- this project is so small that I don't really need to use a robust system. I'll have to try it out for my next project.

My website used to be built using Hexo, but I've ditched it for Eleventy instead. Both are static site generators that use templates and compile into static html files, Eleventy seems more streamlined to me (probably because I built my Hexo site off of a default theme, which makes it a little bit bloated) and I've been able to use it for a few projects for work. I've been liking it a lot so I'd like to get a little better at it.

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