Technology Behind This Site
A personal site does not need much technology. Mine needed to display a couple of paragraphs, a picture or two, and not break. My first idea was therefore to go back to basics and build it with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These technologies are the cornerstones of web development, and they will probably work forever.
Still, building the site was also a good opportunity to see what is currently available for such a simple task.
I deliberately avoided React, Vue and Angular. They are mainstream tools for professional web development and have grown to support much heavier applications. Using one of them here felt like starting from the wrong end: choosing a large tool and then finding a small job for it.
Instead, I looked through a number of frameworks for static site generation. I was interested in two things:
- The framework should describe itself as fast and simple, and its own website should prove the point. I wanted a fast first paint and good performance metrics, not only claims about them.
- Its website should support dark mode, and dark mode should actually work. This turned out to be a less reliable test than I expected; a couple of the examples I checked had obvious problems.
I'll spare you the full list. In the end, I liked SvelteKit the most. Its documentation was clean, its website was fast and simple, and simplicity was one of the project's stated goals. That matched what I wanted from the site.
Of course, this is more machinery than a few static pages strictly require. Plain HTML would still have worked. But SvelteKit gave me something new to investigate without making the result feel unnecessarily heavy, which was the balance I was looking for.
The last question was where to deploy it. Vercel was the first service I tried. Connecting the deployment required a single hook, and that was it. Unbelievably simple.