Case file · Meta
This website
The problem: Proving I can build things needed a built thing. So this site is its own case study — hand-coded, no tracking, no cookies, no analytics.
What I'd do differently: Plenty. I keep the running list on this page and update it as I learn. Honesty is cheaper than maintenance on a fib.
Every site I’ve built has a list like this. Most never get published. Here’s mine.
How it’s put together
Astro, generating static HTML at build time. One hand-written stylesheet, no framework. The only JavaScript that reaches you is the drafting grid behind the headline and a scroll observer, both of which switch off if your system asks for reduced motion. Fonts are self-hosted, so no third party learns you visited. There’s no analytics, so I genuinely don’t know how many people read this.
Fixed so far
- The card and the write-up were the same text, so “full write-up” led to a page you’d already read. Card copy now lives in frontmatter; the body is the write-up.
- Empty pages in the sitemap. Every project generated one, including those with nothing written yet. A project earns a page once its body has something in it.
- Failing contrast. The faintest text sat under WCAG AA against the blueprint ground.
Still on the list
Screenshots, a real photograph, a domain to retire the placeholder in the config, and automated checks on the build — type checking and a link check, so a dead link can’t reach production the way several in this site’s own frontmatter would have.