About a month and a half ago I embarked on a project to both redesign my personal website and migrate my site generator from Jekyll to Eleventy. I’m happy to share that the first phase of this project is now complete: I now have a new, very minimalist site running on Eleventy on a completely new domain: seanvoisen.com. (If you’re reading this post via RSS take a moment to visit the new site on the web.)

I have to admit that this project was a bit of an accident; it was definitely not something I planned to do this year. But, often the best side projects arise not out of detailed planning and foresight—instead they happen as the result of indulging a bit of whim or scratching a particular itch on an idle afternoon. And then, next thing you know, you’re carried away on a new learning adventure.

In my case, there were two specific “itches” that I was trying to scratch. The first was immanently practical: I’d long grown weary of Jekyll and dealing with Ruby dependencies breaking on me after some spontaneous MacOS update. Maybe I’ve been handling my Ruby installation and dependency management incorrectly this whole time—I don’t know, and I don’t really care. I haven’t programmed in Ruby professionally for many, many years, and this wasn’t a problem that I was particularly interested in trying to solve. So, after meeting and chatting with a few folks who are active in the Eleventy community—namely, Bob Monsour and Cory Dransfeldt—I became increasingly convinced that maybe I should just move to a system based on a programming language that I’d be much more comfortable managing for the long-term. As a highly-customizable JavaScript-based tool, Eleventy checks all the right boxes for me.

The second itch was born out of a long-standing creative urge: I’ve long wanted my personal site to be more of a site and less of, simply, a blog. By this I mean I’ve wanted to add more pages of non-blog content, evergreen notes or project portfolio pages or little nooks for things that don’t fit nicely in a reverse chronological format.

Some of my favorite sites on the Internet are not blogs—they are personal websites, wikis or “digital gardens,” places where people share all kinds of interesting content, think out in the open, and maintain notes on topics of obscure (or not-so-obscure) personal interest. Blogs accomplish this same thing to some degree, but blogging is performative in a way that maintaining a personal web site is not. Blogging is typically an act of writing for an audience. As a reader, blogs allow you to get to know the writer through what they choose to say at a podium. Browsing a personal web site, on the other hand, has always felt more like being invited into the writer’s home and getting a glimpse into that person’s inner life through what they display on the walls or their shelves, how they choose their furnishings, what they tend to with great care and what they prefer to neglect, etc.

I want to make my site to feel more like a home.

This will take time, but this redesign on top of new technical infrastructure is my first step in this direction. If you poke around the place you may notice several changes and new additions:

  1. The new design is intentionally minimal and lightweight. There are few images and no web fonts. Some readers might think it’s objectively worse than the old design, but I feel this better reflects my own minimalist personal aesthetic, and forces me to focus on content above all else.
  2. I have added a new notes section for evergreen notes. The collection of notes is currently rather meager, but I have several notes buried in Obsidian that I plan clean up and publish over time.
  3. I have a now page, now.

While I like where I ended up, right now it still feels like I just moved into the place. I imagine there will be plenty of redecorating and rearranging the furniture in the coming months. But, for now, I’m enjoying this new web “home.”