New Improved Webpage
My first post of 2024 and first in a while!
Here's an iced over creek I walk past:
Ironically I almost gave this page up because I couldn't seem to think of a point for it. But I kept coming back to the notion that I wanted to own my content and web presence so I persevered. Usually this kind of project stagnates because I want to see big changes but it's hard to find that path. I ended up making a list of small but important changes to make it less like a template. I like Medium's clean appearance so I went that direction. Things I improved:
- removing blue background and white letters (which I loved, but);
- adding resume page and my updated resume with contact info removed;
- a few social media icons and hiding the formerly ugly rss feed link in an icon;
- updating content and skills;
- lots of small styling things.
I really got hung up on a few small weird eleventy errors along the way. Usually these would be showstoppers for a few years but using ChatGPT really seems to unblock me, even just as an effective rubber duck. One error was that I had a weird problem where every new post I made had the tag "post" added to it. I finally figured out where that was happening.
Then the next day I went through my old posts and cleaned up my tags and pushed it up and it broke! But maybe not because of that. Netlify logs had very unhelpful messages about how my build wanted Node 14 or higher but I have Node 20 installed so.. what!! After a lot of googling and fussing around and updating npm and just dreading having to look through all that more carefully, Chatgpt told me to look at a folder reference which was actually a hidden folder (would have never thought of that, tbh) that had a file (nvrm-ish or something?) in it that had the number "10" in it (and bizarrely, nothing else) which I guess was the Node version it was trying to use. I mean why did that break now?! So I changed that and made sure the Netlify config setting was the same and all is well! Until the next completely obscure problem.
