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Written on Launching my personal site

Launching my personal site

No one's going to know what you think about unless you write and publish your opinions. I'm insecure about putting myself out there. No big launch or waiting for everything to be perfect. Just put this site out there and slowly iterate and improve.

With the launch of a personal site comes the desire to create more instead of consume. By having a site up it forces myself to create content for it. For the last couple of weeks I got into the habit of writing notes, posting links and creating journal entries. It's time to start taking this to the next level by scheduling more time for writing and work on longer opinionated articles.

Control of content

Instead of relying on social media channels to publish notes and blogging platforms such as medium for articles I wanted control over how I presented myself online. I create markdown files, commit them to this repository and then syndicate elsewhere. Inspired by the IndieWeb concept where you are in control of your own content. The content I put out is a resource for myself, writing about topics that my past self would have found really helpful.

MVP

This personal site is powered by Hand Coding™ with a splash of 11ty and many plugins and packages. You can peek [at the source on GitHub](at the source on GitHub), it's hosted on Netlify. Layout and accessible components are from Every Layout and Inclusive Components. CSS follows the ITCSS architecture and the component folder structure is based on Atomic Design. Small design tweaks come from Refactoring UI.

I have a Notion board to keep track of everything I want to add to this website, both from a design and development perspective. Lots of components are still to be made and performance & accessibility improvements are on their way. A good personal website is an investment: it's an iterative process and consumes quite a lot of my time but it's also a playground to try out new things such as browser features or design exploration. A little corner of the internet hat I own.

Better writing

From all the skills I'm pretty decent at, writing is the one thing I suck at. I have lots of thoughts and scribble notes in a small Field Notes book (about ~112 drafts and ideas) but never ever have I taken the time to craft them into good sentences that are enjoyable to read. The idea is to start drafts for a little momentum and then improve over time. I created a writing workflow under the 'guides' section to have a bit of structure. Oh well, improving this skill comes from doing and deliberately practicing so let this be the first step.

Danny de Vries