benjaminchait / www

Personal site of Benjamin Chait.

www - personal homepage

Built by Benjamin Chait

Basics

www is a Jekyll-generated static site. My production instance is deployed using Netlify. You can learn more using their lovely documentation or by sending me a note to ask a question.

Newsletter

In my _redirects config, I link this repository with https://github.com/benjaminchait/newsletter for serving media when sent via email.

Principles

Writing a few words about my general approach. These are not set in stone, but some guiding principles in how this site is designed and meant to work...

• Keep it simple: When possible, bias toward repeatability, scalability, and avoiding custom/proprietary tooling. As a statically-generated site, the technology should be replaceable in the future with minimal impact.
• Focus on content: As a personal site, the text and images are paramount. Keeping content managed in a clear, easy-to-understand manner is really helpful for others to learn from, but also for my future self :)
• Speed is usability: Even with modern devices, bandwidth and processing impact the experience. This might be more critical to developing/pushing updates; but would be evident if serving original, high-resolution photos (rather than those which are optimized for this layout).
• Build scaleable workflows: Images are currently sized at 1280px (which is 640px @ 2x for high-res "retina" devices); but are typically sourced from much larger source files. When possible, ensure a scalable workflow to generate and replace those images in the future.
• Work in public: Personal websites have changed a lot over the years; share how this is built, offer guidance and support, and help others to participate in the web.

History

• 2003: Registered my full name as a dot net URL, hosted on Media Temple. Went through a number of iterations: hand-crafted HTML pages, a bespoke CMS running a very simple SQL database (which I later accidentally "dropped" resulting in me learning the value of backups), and eventually running WordPress.
• 2013: Spun-up an instance with Digital Ocean, continued on WordPress.
• 2020: Migrated to a statically-generated site powered by Netlify, though most content was just copied from the wp-content downloaded from my DO instance.
• 2022: Finally cleaned-up the directory structure and properly updated all the images and content.