heffdotdev technical details

This site is the latest iteration of my personal home on the web. Over the years I have used a few different formats for my online debris, including but not limited to: geocities & angelfire, myspace, twitter, student portfolios built with & hosted by cargocollective or format, a number of abandoned blogs with wordpress, tumblr, medium, and static site generators like jekyll w/ github pages.

through all of the above, some things I realized:

• I need to be able to add my own code to wherever my content lives.
• If the effort to publish posts is high, I will not keep the habit for long.
  • Twitter is best example of this, in that there’s practically no barrier to posting and it’s the only one I’ve managed to use consistently through the years.
• I need my site to be more than just an archive of posts

Technical requirements for my site:

• Svelte as the main framework
• Tailwind for styles
• Low barrier to publish
• Performant
• Easy for me to add custom code to, when necessary

All the above considered, I knew I was going to go the static site generator route again. There are a million wonderful choices out there.

I originally started my site refresh mid-pandemic using Sapper, because I wanted to try out Svelte. I got it hooked up with netlify CMS and it worked well enough, but after that step I sorta just set it aside while I focused on other things. I’m blessed to have a well paying career, so rebuilding my portfolio site wasn’t exactly a priority. Sometimes it takes a while for me to get the ball rolling. Anyways, when I picked this project back up, I discovered that Sapper was deprecated, in favor of sveltekit. Essentially the same thing, but more production-ready. So I started looking into Sveltekit, and also I knew I wanted to use tailwind too. Tailwind’s been in my peripherals for some time, but I never had a good opportunity at work to bring it in.

So for the re-refresh, I started looking to see if anyone had put out a starterkit that used Svelte and Tailwind and then I’d figure out the publishing portion after that, potentially going with netlify CMS again as a low-effort easily managed .md-based CMS. And then I found swyxkit! Which perfectly filled all of the technical requirements with plenty of other nice enhancements out of the box to boot.

So this blog is based on swyxkit which means:

• Svelte based, very performant
• Tailwind for styling
• Github Issues as a CMS, so the barrier to posting is practically nothing. With an interface & formatting I’m extremely familiar with.
• Easy to extend with my custom code on top of the kit.

And that’s basically it. Neat!