hi. this is where i will document / explain how i made this site and why i decided to do stuff the way i did
the [hypothetical] skin
in terms of design process/aesthetic? originally it was inspired by šlama which is wonderfully designed, in my opinion, and also just an amazing project that everyone should know about.
i wanted to make it look like the opposite of my original design[s] / typical "aesthetics."
there's also huge importance in animations of sites because like yeah, the site can load in 0.002ms or whatever, but without telling the user what has changed in some way or another, it can become disorienting/hard to follow content.
the bones
realistically, any framework would have worked, but i chose Next.js because:
- i wanted to learn it
- (+integration with other frameworks i've already learned; i.e., d3js)
- i wanted to use react-three-fiber (wonderfully documented)
also, this was originally a template, but it had a bunch of unnecessary things, so i just used it as inspiration for how to deal with file structures and understanding routing in Next.js over something like svelte.
otherwise, this is also completely doable in regular ol html/css/javascript.
the flesh
this site is using MDX, which is a way to have markdown with components right next to it, which makes it a bit more dynamic and more fun to write in over just an html file. that being said this is an absolutely unnecessary abstraction.
it is also using next-mdx-remote to handle reading these files from disk over using a cms, but a cms is also something that can be migrated to if i wanted to make it more complicated and harder to maintain.
the [applied] skin
tailwind is used for css and shadcn for accessible units (that being said, this isn't necessarily a site that would need all too much to make accessible from scratch over using a framework).
react-aria was also another that i had considered, but i didn't need something that industrial, BUT if i were working on a big project i would probably use that given that adobe's design system extends a bit further than shadcn/adds additional functionality that might take more work to implement.
sEo
personally, i don't really care about SEO -- but also this site does implement some stuff that would help it rise in results. it is (mostly) static, so it makes it easy to index, but as of currently, i have asked search engines to not crawl this site with hopes that this is kept mostly, or ranked low for now. regular html is also just static.
understandable if you want to focus on that, and it feels mostly a black box. some of the click-bait-y sites seem to have the formula on lock, so you might want to start by looking at those and using tags, or keywords that would make your content more discoverable, idk tbh.
to further understand it i would probably start by reading google's guide, but also probably do your own research. this is kind of built as an semi-'anti-seo' site.
starvingsalamander? salamanderstarv.ing??
i wanted the fun ending of .ing, so that's what i did. the origin of the name [?? phrase???] was from high school i forgot for what exactly, probably just wanting to find an alliterating phrase.