What’s Going On?

After yet another long hiatus, my instructor website is undergoing a reconstruction.

I’ve actually been working on my instructor website since the early 2000s. I knew that having some kind of site that I can point students to for resources and information would be useful. But key to making it all work in the ways I wanted was to have it easy to maintain in both content and design. Not an easy task, given the state of web technologies at the time.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m rebuilding from the ground up on Astro. My last build was on VuePress, for which I was holding great promise. Of course, that was before the whole COVID thing which sidetracked a lot of my plans.

So, what has changed? First of all, I started with an Astro template/theme by Mark Horn called Astro Sphrere. It was pretty clean and easy to understand and modify. I liked the aspect that it made use of Tailwind (which I am only now starting to explore). After a few modifications where I could make some clean separations between content and style, I think I’ve got something that I can work well with. What’s even better is the whole aspect that I get to focus on Markdown for my content and that it’s extensible via MDX and any combination of JS frameworks. Components and Islands for the win!

Right now, the Works and Projects pages are Mark Horn’s lorem-ipsum pages, which I’ll have to update for my own situation. But I’m quite pleased with the result (especially as I’m not really a designer, just a developer).

There’s a lot to be done with this. I’ll be adopting it to my personal blog/site as well, and between the two I want to consolidate the various articles and tutorials that I’ve written over the years. Given that the diploma for which I teach is being replaced with a new one, these will become an effective archive for my old material and a home for what’s new.