Billy Bjork | How I built this website

For most of my life, my main creative outlet has been making videos. But for the last 9 months, most of my creative energy has gone towards learning to write software.

I've recently completed my second web development project—this website you're currently visiting. I made it from scratch, and the rest of this post is about what I learned doing it.

We'll look at some code snippets in Bash, Python, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML (extended with htmx and Jinja2). I'll do my best to translate them for you (and myself).

Naturally, I wanted to build something that could not be done in Wix—some element of interactivity. Ideally, one that would work on both desktop and mobile, with little hassle.

I ruled out interactivity based on cursor position / hover state, since that wouldn't apply to mobile. Which led me to consider scrolling as the basis for interactivity.

Both ChatGPT and Claude kindly assured me it could be done, and one good way to do it would utilize sprite sheets. Sprite sheets? New to me too.

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