This site is a work in progress. Instead of launching when it’s complete, I’m showing it as I work on it and documenting it on the blog. There might be accessibility errors, bugs, misspellings, poor grammar, and bad or no design decisions.

Site Init

October 7, 2023

I’ve had a personal site for many years with my work: websites, graphic design, and artwork. I wanted to build one that’s strictly web development. New domain. New tech stack. A place to post web and tech related things so I can remember them later.

Rather than launch the site when it’s production quality, I wanted to show document it while I build it. I’m starting by setting up the framework (Astro) and writing plain HTML with a little bit of CSS. It will get better over time.

What I’ve done so far

  • Register the domain scottwild.dev
  • Create a Git and add to GitHub
  • Install Astro
  • Add .env
  • Setup Netlify
    • Connect repository
    • Create TOML with build configuration
    • Enable pull request deploy previews
    • Add environment variables
  • Install Netlify integrations
    • Lighthouse
    • a11y plugin which use pa11y which uses Axe-core
    • Test integrations with intentional errors
  • Add favicon (one of the first things I do)
    • Create an 8-bit capital s in Illustrator using Arcade Game Typography as a reference
    • Add light and dark mode
    • Add a favcion.ico format for pages that aren’t HTML
    • Export 16×16 and 32×32 PNGs
  • Setup blog file structure
  • Add RSS feed
  • Add RSS style
  • Create basic layouts and components
  • Add announcement banner so no one things this is production ready
  • Setup plausible analytics – it’s nice to know if anyone is passing by
    • Only load if Netlify CONTEXT=production
  • Add basic CSS reset and styles (It was hard to restrain myself)
  • Add documentation to README
  • Remove test files
  • Run Axe, WAVE, and Lighthouse… if it fails I’m bad at my job
  • Setup DNS
  • Merge Pull Request #1!

What’s next

  • Look at capturing releases: Git tags, manual screenshots, puppeteer
  • Test typefaces from different foundries, no Google fonts
  • Add accessibility testing tools and scripts
  • Add tests and pre-commit hooks
  • Look at asset optimization (Netlify removed that feature)