2//Grimoire Redesign

(If you're looking at the single-post-page, sorry in advance about the formatting below: Polywork clears each link to its own line, which changes the flow of this post into some kinda free-form prose or something. While pretty, I'm working on fixing that somehow. Sorry ^_^;;)

Well, it's been about 2 years since I reworked my homepage (!!), so I committed this past weekend to doing just that. 💙

The new site is expanded into a grimoire📘 — a place to store thoughts, learnings, instructions, and generalize knowledge. It's going to lean towards the technical, but like Polywork, I'll store a little bit of everything there.

The grimoire also leans technical because compSci is kinda like magic, innit?

Tangent!, but, y'all ever think about how we write code (spells⚡) and turn thoughts into miracles (thaumaturgy🙏) and make our clients/business stakeholders/friends and family smile (m a g i c k 💫 )? Isn't that wild? It's wild! So I think it's pretty fitting to base a site around that concept.

"We are ALL open sourcerors on this blessed day."

(Also, I'm Wiccan, albeit rather secularly. Hi!)

Anyway~

The site's main methodology is Jamstack ✨, and it's built on a mix of tech — SvelteKit for the static UI/routing, Hugo for markdown > JSON conversion, Netlify as a backend, and GitHub as a file store.

I've been very, very taken with Svelte/SvelteKit for the past year or so, so having another excuse to use it for a site is nice c:

And I've fallen in love with Hugo due to a few work projects, and using it as a glorified mini-ETL/parser is kinda ridiculous, but like SvelteKit, I'm glad to leverage it again. 💙💙

And the same story goes on — I've built some stuff with Netlify, so I'm using it again, as well as GitHub.

And I did this in one weekend; I'm wildly excited that it came together so, so smoothly. Shoutout to all of the teams mentioned above!

(And although this isn't a tutorial post :: if you want to do something similar: use Netlify's adapter for SvelteKit and point Netlify at GitHub, where your site will be stored. Roll your own Hugo config file and lean heavily on the Hugo docs. And, if you get stuck, leverage my GitHub repo where I've made everything about this project public 💙)

I want to note that I'm not using these technologies because they're familiar; I'm using them because I want to deepen my understanding of them. Every new project is a chance to learn something new, as well as exercise what's been learned, right? So I really wanted to push myself here.

So, I'm pleased to relate, that I think I did pretty okay. ✨

And I'm still not done!! :D 💙✨ 🚀🚀🚀

By that, I mean that this site is soooo much more flexible compared to my old site. I can play with it. I can try stuff out. I can extend things. Break things. Build things. Iterate over things, on a rapid scale.

So, I'm extremely pleased to relate, that I'm extremely pleased with what this site represents. It's not just a blog + portfolio. It's a sandbox, full of learning, which is an ideal I try to emulate every single day. 🥺

Have you redesigned something recently? Tried a new stack, or decided to have fun in prod? DM me on twitter 🕊; I'd love to hear about it! ^_^

Kindest,
Lilith