IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIVE!

Well, I hope so anyway. I'm trying 11ty and I don't know what I'm doing.

History

I registered gmgmgm.design in 2019. I think. Back then I worked at GoDaddy so I got a nice discount.

v0

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Clearly I was hired for my personality and not my talent.

The first version of this site was on Managed WordPress hosting. I used Semplice, which I think was in version 5. This was more of a web design portfolio -- it got me a position at GoDaddy on their web design team off of a few freelance and school projects.

The purple, cream, and red color scheme feels pretty unique. I think the red and cream was from some marketing website for a book. Not sure how I got purple in there. I had the usual problems with WordPress, the whole backend on top of a WYSIWYG editor was super bloated for my use case, and the security was horrible.

v1

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I still like this one.

After getting thrown out of GoDaddy during The Great Tech Layoffs(tm), I had to finally go back and update my portfolio. At this point I was extremely over web design and wanted to get more into the techy part of the web, so I leaned hard into UX.

This new version of my portfolio moved to Cargo. I leaned into dark mode with a nice taxi-yellow accent, using Authentic for the type. A grid-based layout with a sidebar and a content area worked pretty nice, but it was slow since I didn't focus on media optimization.

This portfolio lived through two new roles at Two Barrels and Legends until I discovered...

v2

...Posts.cv!

A tiny microblogging platform with a well-curated community of designers and developers. I'm not sure how many users it had, but it was the perfect amount -- if you visited once a day, you could read all the new content on the site in probably an hour, but it was all very inspirational.

On top of the social aspect, Sites.cv let you build a nice little portfolio. The templates were cool and it directly linked with Read.cv, their résumé builder. I put in all my info, chose a template, got to work customizing it exactly how I wanted, and then --

Aw man.

v3

Here we are, baby. Posts.cv and all the, uh, "excitement" at Twitter and Meta have just convinced me to give up on other platforms and build it myself.

I needed:

A static site generator is perfect for this -- it serves the content as fast as possible, and all of them allow as little or as much custom code as you want.

Since I knew I'd only be worried about text and images, I tried to find the least-complicated way to go, so I landed on 11ty. I really only need some templating and I figured Markdown is about as portable as it gets. I'll store my site at Github so I can take it everywhere. I also moved my domain to Porkbun cause they're cute.

If you're reading this, it must have worked.