Year two in the books

It’s been two years since I created this site! Things have slowed down a bit around here, mostly because some of the goals I created last year turned out to warrant a new site (with another on the way!).

How did I stack up to last year’s “What’s next”?

• Tinkering? Check.
• Writing more about other topics? Check, but elsewhere.
• Freelancing? Check.

Here’s a non-complete list of some of the tinkering I did over the past year, in no particular order…

• Added a dark theme
• Added a contact form (and discovered that the email address I used in the contact link previously was configured wrong, in the unlikely event that you emailed me and never heard back, sorry!)
• Added web monetization (and have made a whopping $0.02!)
• Added Plausible Analytics
• Added Kofi link to posts (and got a tip from my big fan!)
• Added IndieWeb markup
• Did a lot of spring cleaning

I also added a new accidental project. More about the project on the project page.

Instead of trying to incorporate non-web dev writing here I created a new site, Dana Byerly’s Digital Junk Drawer. I wrote a bit about the decision at this site, and about using WordPress as a headless content management system for Eleventy (Part one: WordPress set up and Part two: Eleventy set-up).

Since I added Plausible Analytics to the site in the past year I now know which posts were popular. Here are the top three:

• Using Airtable with Eleventy
• Dear HTML element
• WordPress & Eleventy part one: WordPress

I also updated the About page to reflect a bit about my work experience since I don’t have a proper portfolio or resume listed here. I’m not necessarily looking to change jobs, but wanted to make it easier to get a sense of my skills, experience and approach.

This year I launched two new sites for a friend, effectively starting on a path towards freelancing.

• Rhonda Lieberman’s site
• The Cats-in-Residence Program

I don’t think I’ll be ditching the day job to freelance full time in the near future, but as mentioned before, “I would like to continue to do little, well-crafted sites for individuals or small businesses”.

I’m currently working on a new site for a small business. It’s still in the early stages but it will be built with Eleventy and might use WordPress for some content management.

After that I’m hoping to launch a site specifically for freelancing. I’m tentatively thinking of calling it Dana Byerly Studio. Unimaginative, I know. But straightforward and clear. And broad enough that it could encompass more than I’m currently imagining.

The tinkering will continue to continue! Along those lines I do have some plans to revamp the Projects section. I’m going to archive some old projects, rearchitect some of the data and give the listing page a slight redesign.

I’m also going to rework the homepage to focus more on writing and minimize projects. Writing and projects currently have equal billing but there hasn’t been much traffic from the homepage to either of the featured project pages. Most of the individual project page traffic is from search.

I also want to integrate links to the Junk Drawer and the eventual Studio site, and am working on how best to do that.

The writing around here will remain “Hey I figured this out” type of web dev stuff, and a place to write about my side projects. Bloggy types of writing will be at the Junk Drawer.

Here’s to another year!