Check it out! (to see an approximation of the old homepage, click the "List" view)

Well, 13 years after the last one, I decided it was time to take another look at what I wanted my homepage to be. I briefly considered hiring a designer, but that seems expensive and I didn't really know what I wanted anyway.

Since I was using Bootstrap already, I took a look at some Bootstrap themes, but they just seemed like ways to make the structure you have look nicer. Eventually I figured out that I just wanted to highlight my projects, found an example, and copied it 🙂

Some odds and ends:

  • Most of the work was extracting all the information about the projects into a JSON file. Then I used the Jinja templating language to generate the homepage. The syntax is basically the same as what Django uses - it's pretty nice! I also got rid of a few old projects that don't work anymore.
  • I was a little wary that adding thumbnail images would make the page too big. I was hoping to use WebP images (they're really widely supported now!) but I couldn't make it work with the fancy gray background, which is actually an SVG canvas. I struggled for a few hours trying to make it work and then said "ehh, good enough". The whole page is still under 1MB, which is pretty good!
  • I also added a few things to the "popular" tag based on usage logs. (the clue solver is more popular than I thought!)
  • I also trimmed the "recent" projects, which used to go all the way back to 2008 🙂