Features

These are some of the little details in the site that I’m proud of. You can always see how they work in the source code.

• prefers-color-scheme support
• custom responsive image support
• JavaScript is not required
• custom tag cloud
• full-text RSS
• zero client-side trackers (I track some stats server-side)
• high Lighthouse and WebPagetest scores

History

This site’s tech stack throughout the years.

• June 2021

  The site now auto deploys through GitHub actions.

  I’ve built my own image processing pipeline using some hacky node scripts that uploads to a DigitalOcean Spaces CDN. I was running into issues where without caches the site would take 10+ minutes to build, primarily due to the number of image variations I support in my responsive image templates, which prevented automating deployments. It’s not perfect—there’s a fair amount of duplication of knowledge between the hugo and npm sides of things and file fingerprinting could be a lot better, but it’s a fairly simple, as it should be for a personal website.

• March 2020

  Hugo static site with a custom theme. I chose Hugo since it’s the top starred static site generator on StaticGen that doesn’t rely on client-side rendering. I’m familiar with Go-style templates, which Hugo uses. Since switching, I’ve even contributed to the project. It has a good mix of power and simplicity and ships as a standalone binary (no ruby installation to deal with). I still use Digital Ocean and nginx but now host several other sites and tools. I’m using docker, docker-compose, and some custom scripts to provision and isolate each app.

  For newer apps, I generally use docker from the start. Some have images published to GitHub packages; some don’t. For projects I’m not planning to revisit or have archived, I reverse-engineered Dockerfiles and stored them in my host-configuration repo.

• October 2016

  Added https support through Let’s Encrypt.

• June 2014

  Jekyll static site with a custom theme. I chose Jekyll because it’s pretty universal and produces a static site. Around this time, I also switched to DigitalOcean for hosting and an nginx web server.

• February 2012

  I transferred my domain name to Namecheap. At some point, I switched to the Stacey CMS with a custom theme. I chose Stacey because it’s very lightweight and PHP was my primary language at the time. Hosted on Dreamhost with Apache.

• September 2010

  Registered camlittle.com with GoDaddy and set up a homemade PHP website.