Amorphic

Personal site. You are here!

In the present, it is a landing page, a list of projects, and a repository of links for content elsewhere on the web.

In the past, it took on a lot of different forms.

In the future, it will become a database of my thoughts and work and learnings. It may change shape continuously throughout the process.

Technologies and Assets

Code

I use wanderer as the framework to generate this site, which uses static HTML, CSS, and JS pages. Implementation details for the framework can be found there.

The content is written in Markdown, in a shared folder on Dropbox.

The site is hosted on Netlify.

Fonts

The fonts currently used on the site are Barlow for headers and navigation links, and a custom serif font for body text. In the past, I’ve used Fontsquirrel’s generator to aggressively remove unneeded characters and trim down the filesize. Currently I have a script that runs glyphhanger to accomplish the same.

Past Technologies

Here is an in-depth look at the history of this website.

For all of 2019, this site was built atop of Gatsby and ReactJS. I used it because I was familiar with React, and Gatsby’s main selling point is that data can be structured in any way. I used Markdown and CSV files to structure my content.

However, the Gatsby ecosystem proved fragile for my use case, in that various dependencies would get out of date and then refuse to build. Gatsby was also complex enough that there would be a minor ramp-up just for me to update content.

Before 2019, the site was implemented using Jekyll atop Github Pages.

Jekyll is built in Ruby, a language I barely know, and has a fairly strict structure for posts (including enforced dates in the title, as far as I remember). I transitioned off of it as I wanted to use my own structure for posts.

Github Pages requires Jekyll, so once I transitioned away from Jekyll, I had to transition from Github Pages as well.

Fonts I’ve used in the past include Crimson Pro, Charter, Georgia, and Source Sans Pro.