I have maintained a personal website since 1998. In those days your choices were basically static HTML or Flash. I went with Flash which was basically a keyframe based vector animation tool that could include different media types. You sent people to a single URL and built a website much like a CD-ROM. Honestly having come from an art background I loved Flash but it was not to survive the next wave of the internet which needed to include phones and tablets over a wide range of connections.

After a period of keeping a static hardcoded Dreamweaver site, I decided to embrace CMS and learn how to build in WordPress. I had already had to learn the basics of Magento for my job so PHP wasn’t completely foreign. Around 2014 I took the deep dive and built a custom theme with its own scss UI framework.

Fast forward to 2017. After learning Angular for another job I decided to rebuild my website using a JS framework. I decided to go with React, and used Redux to handle data coming from my WordPress API. I took the my scss framework, and turned it into a React component UI library. This site might still be available here.

Now it’s 2023, so of course I have a completely new front end. Still React but now in Typescript, using Next for routing, Mantine for us, and Apollo client connecting to wpgraphql. In this last rebuild I tried a few CMS (Storyblok, Prismic, Contentful) but in the end this WordPress database I started in 2015 is still the one feeding this very post and most of the site. GraphQL has made getting post data so much easier and whatever customizations I need ACF can handle.

Anyway welcome to my everything page where I collect all my posts. Anything under the Changelog or News categories maybe outdated.