So that was fun. I just wanted to share my latest fun project that you can check out over at https://1999.vargur.dev! I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately and figured I’d recreate something a little bit like the neocities sites, myspace pages, and personal websites of old. There’s just something about the style that was really quite lovely.
You’ve also got to admit that everything is just *so slow* nowadays. Ever tried to load a Reddit page and noticed that their web app sits loading for 10 seconds? What about when you might click to buy something on a shopping website and nothing happens. Open up dev tools or look into any codebase and you’ll be hit in the face with dozens hundreds of packages! A web page only needs to serve you information and maybe have some interactivity but holy shit things have gotten out of hand.
It all seems to come down to the web browser basically being its own OS these days. Everything is done through a web browser and it’s no wonder that Google marketed Chromebooks so heavily not all that long ago. There could well have been a world where the only thing people knew was Chrome and Electron. Ew.
So how about making a website just be a website eh? Some nice HTML, a bit of styling, maybe even a tiny bit of JS. Boom, we’re good. Here it is: Performance!
And you know what? I think it looks pretty snazzy, too. I even have a fancy pants projects page ๐
Now I might have lied just a little here -t’s not purely 1999-style – I didn’t even use PHP! What I did end up using, however, was Eleventy. It’s a static site generator with some nice, simple templating functionality. Most of the files are .njk files and allow a specific type of markup to denote the template to use (below).
Even better is that I can then use markdown files to build pages with essentially the same setup. It’s really neato and it compiles down into basic HTML, CSS, and JS. It’s all you need most of the time and I really don’t care for any backend fancy shenanigans on this site.
Here’s that code for the templating (from my home.njk)
---
layout: layout.njk
title: "โ
ใใฏใใใ โ
"
bodyClass: "normal-page"
---
<div class="normal-container">
Content here
</div>So yeah that’s all really. Go check out the site and cringe a bit. It’s all intentional ๐
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