Colophon

This page aims to showcase the tools I used to build this website.

I used to build my websites with Jekyll but this time, I went with Eleventy. The main reason I switched is that I’ve had issues running Jekyll on my PC in the past, and I didn’t want to struggle again. Since Eleventy is Node based, I figured it would be easier. Plus, it seemed pretty popular, so I was curious to try it.

I deploy with Netlify from Github which is super newb-friendly. Highly recommend. Netlify deploys my updates everytime I push to my main branch on Github so I don’t need to worry about anything else.

For styling, I rely on CSS. I use Custom Properties so I can make themes easily (you can switch by clicking the little colored boxes in the footer). You can do this by defining your theme variables in :root and then changing said variables in the relevant theme attribute selector as follow:

:root {
  --bg: #fdf8f6; 
  --text: #2a201f;
}

[data-theme="solarized"] {
  --bg: #fdf6e3;
  --text: #313c41;
}

body {
  background-color: var(--bg);
  color: var(--text);
}

For typefaces, I use a system font stack. It’s comfortable and free.

For the Messages section of this website, I created a new collection with 11ty and used markdown-it to wrap every paragraph inside a container with a class that makes them look like chat bubbles. Every line break creates a new bubble. This was inspired to me by Anhvn and is my final tentative to create a high-maintenance section on this website.

I am currently investigating how I could could push these messages from my phone directly. I tried with a Zapier integration so I could mail Zapier and then it would push a new markdown file to my Github but I had formatting issues. I will get back to that at some point if I decide to keep that section.

I write everything with VSCode. I used ChatGPT to proof-read the About section of this website.