Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

This week, I decided to rewrite my website using plain HTML and CSS. When I originally made it, I used SvelteKit for simplicity. It was a more interesting project than I was expecting when I started working so I wanted to share my thoughts on the experience.

There are a number of reasons I decided to do the rewrite. One is that I’m currently unemployed so I have a lot of free time for side projects. Another is that, as you can see, this website is pretty simple so I wasn’t gaining a lot from using SvelteKit. I also wanted to move the site over to Cloudflare Pages so this was an opportune time to make some changes.

However, the primary reason I decided to make some changes is that I find the Javascript bundler and building ecosystem incredibly aggravating to use. For example, one of the things I set up my old website to do was build the blog section from the set of Markdown posts. I assumed this would be easy to do. SvelteKit and Vite allow you to prerender your website and I had a set of files at build time - I just needed to add some logic to transform them. Instead, it was infuriatingly difficult to figure out a way to just get a handle to a set of files in my tree at build time (let me caveat that I’m not a frontend dev and maybe I missed something obvious). It took me hours of Googling and trying out different options to come up with this awful piece of code that worked to load the contents of a file and give them to my page:

I was tired of dealing with things like this for the tiny amount I was gaining from using SvelteKit. And so, I finally decided it was time for a rewrite.

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