For the last couple of weeks I've been slowly starting to re-do my site. The design itself I don't see changing significantly. Part of it is my near constant desire to keep tweaking. Another is to try to clean up some of the tech debt I'd accumulated over the course of building this site. The one part I want to focus on is how I share links.

Tech Debt

When I first started building my site with 11ty, I over-engineered some pieces of the code not fully understanding how it worked or how I could really utilize its functionality. Because of this, I've found plenty of code that is messy, tries to do too much, or just isn't in use anymore. This next build, I'm planning to start from scratch. Remove all my collections, filters, and everything else. And then as I build out the site, reintroduce it as needed and clean it up. It feels a little extreme, but it's my personal site and well, it's what I feel like doing. It'll hopefully make future modifications.

Cleaning Up CSS

I very often feel like my CSS is a mess. It's probably my weak link when it comes to web development with the HTML/CSS/JS trio. Much like with the rest of the tech debt, I'm thinking it would be worth it to treat my CSS the same way. Clean it up and try to streamline my styles. Unrelated, I think I might start looking for a good CSS online class to take.

Sharing Links

To get a better understanding of what I'm thinking with regards to link sharing, one thing to keep in mind would be that I share links in several places, and part of what I want to accomplish in this redesign, is to figure out how I want to continue moving forward. I share links in way too many different places and part of me is wondering if I need to condense things.

Reading Logs

My reading logs is where it all began. I really enjoyed posts like Dew Drop by Alvin Ashcraft. It provides a daily list of links from various sources about what's going on in various dev realms, with a slight focus on .NET. I generally don't have time to read and share so many links on a daily basis, so I decided to start my reading logs and post them weekly. I generally read enough weekly to make it worth it. There's no information about each link other than a general category.

From a technical perspective, I used to build this manually saving each link to a text file. Then I started adding them to Notion, and building them manually from that. Then I decided to take it a step further and built a C# console application to build the bulk of the post for me. Now I save them to my media repository and a console app pulls them from there and builds out the markdown file for the post.

Links

My links page came from my reading logs page. I store all the links, so why not just share them on a page. It's sort of the firehose of all the links I want to share. Every link on this page was or will be posted in my reading log. Here the only context behind them is the type (article, podcast, or video).

Blog Posts

While not the usual way, there are the occasional blog post where I'm sharing a link because I might not be really adding my 2¢ as much as promoting it with some context. It's one of those weird spots where it's not quite a note as it's just a "hey check out what this person did!".

Week Notes

Each week notes I share a couple of links with some thoughts around them. I'm starting to think that I might just switch the format back to focusing on what I did the past week and move any links I want to share to the notes page.

Notes

The final piece is my notes page. I shamelessly stole borrowed this idea from the likes of Jim Nielsen, Jeremy Keith, Jason Kottke, and I'm sure others. The whole premise is that I'm sharing links with either a few personal notes about the link or a quote from the piece. This is a section of my site where I'm questioning its design. I often view this page and it feels a little crowded.

Simplifying Things

I'm not sure exactly hot I want to do this. I'm tackling most of my other pages with the redesign first, putting off how to best handle my notes page in particular. I definitely want a cleaner look for the page though I haven't fully flushed that out. From a design perspective, this will probably be the biggest change from the current design.

I love having a personal site to monkey around with.