Year one in the books

I’m happy to report that it’s been a year with this version of the site 🎉.

Initially I set out to create a place where I could share and talk about my side projects as well as whatever I was learning at the time. Over the past year that’s mostly been centered around Eleventy, the static site generator used to create this site. I don’t use any analytics on this site so I have no idea which posts were visited the most, but I do have a RSS feed, and at least one follower in Feedly (which is me, I am my own follower).

Without knowing what anyone else found helpful, here are a few posts that I found helpful and enjoyed writing.

• Using Airtable with Eleventy
• Dynamic heading levels in Eleventy
• Testing Forestry CMS with Eleventy

In addition to Eleventy I’ve also been learning more accessibility, and I’ve written about that as well. Some highlights include creating accessible and responsive tables for an Eleventy project and taking a look at the level of accessibility of NYC mayoral candidates campaign sites. I’ve also created an Accessibility Statement for the site.

The other major topic has been my projects, and in the past year I’ve given four of them major updates and have one that gets updated each year.

• Random Replay Generator spiff up
• Horse Racing Datasets redesigned
• Responsive and Accessible Data Tables
• Migrating the Pile
• Annual Kentucky Derby 8 ball

I’ve also written about little updates around here like the footer and adding a Style Guide, the homepage and Projects landing page and optimizing images.

When I launched the site I had an initial What’s next list, here’s how it fared…

Completed or at least worked on:

• Tightening up the CSS
• Improving accessibility
• Maybe expanding the color palette a bit
• Add more details to some of the Projects
• Add release notes (decided to call it Changelog)
• Keep on fiddling (evergreen!)

Still might do:

• Adding a dark mode for the prefers-color-scheme: dark among you
• Adding ability to toggle between dark and light mode
• Depending on the volume and type of writing I end up doing I might make individual feeds for Articles and Notes (assuming someone other than me eventually subscribes to my RSS feed)
• Maybe eventually add a Photos section

It’s been fun having the site, I’ve enjoyed tinkering and making improvements as I go. First and foremost the tinkering will continue.

Most of my longer form writing has been the “Hey I just figured this out” style of how-to. I love this approach and it’s helped me to better understand what I learned as well as remember what I’ve learned. I’ll likely keep doing these.

I’m also going to try to write more observations and thoughts, and maybe even some posts that aren’t about the Web. One idea I’ve been kicking around is doing some Personal Wayback Machine posts of old work. As an Internet Old (and a plain old Old) I have projects going back to the 90s, which can be both embarrassing and awesome.

Now that this site is in pretty good shape and I’ve completed updates on my major side projects, I’m hoping to eventually pick up some small freelance gigs here and there. I’m currently having fun working on a couple of projects for a friend and would like to help independent creative people or small businesses have nice performant, accessible sites. I guess we’ll see how that works out in next year’s “year in review”.