Eating my own dog food

— 3 minute read

For those that follow me on Twitter, you might have seen this poll that I created:

Poll: do I just burn my site to the ground and roll out Hylia and slowly redesign it over the next few months?

The results were a mind-blowing 79% for and 21% against, so I did what any other sensible person would do in the situation: I burned down my live site and re-platformed it with my Eleventy starter kit, Hylia.

A long road ahead permalink

I don’t really have time or the will to redesign my website at the moment, but I do have time to use it as a way of testing the boundaries of Hylia. I want Hylia to be as flexible as possible, so in my head, if I push it as far as I think it can go, I’ll be forever improving it—even for the most basic of use cases.

My site is pretty big now, with all of the articles, notes and links, so it’s good to see how Hylia handles that amount of content. So far, so good!

I also want to use my site as a test for new features for Hylia. The first one I’ll play around with is adding webmentions. I like to keep things transparent, so here’s my Notion board, so you can see what I’m playing with and planning to play with. You can also check out the source code of the site.

I’m already pushing back into Hylia permalink

The biggest benefit of dogfooding Hylia is that I’m going to be constantly finding ways of improving it. Heck, I’ve already pushed a release out with UI issues that I found while migrating my site!

I spend a lot of time messing around with my site, so I’ll get plenty of exposure to my own project. I imagine that I’ll keep finding little niggles as I slowly review how the content on the site now runs, so expect more of these little releases over time.

A long redesign process permalink

As I insinuated on Twitter, this is going to be a very long, slow redesign process. I kind of needed this hard line in the sand because the codebase of the old design was a complete mess. The site looked great, but maintaining it and improving it was a chore.

Hopefully now, I’ll find it easier to improve my site, add some Indieweb stuff and more importantly, turn it into a helpful tool for landing new freelance gigs!

Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer

I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.

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