This version of my site has been designed in a bit of a new way. I started by importing all of the content from the previous version, and added in as many other talks and resources that I could find. I built it out with minimal styling just to get everything in one place. Housing about a hundred conference talks turned out to take a lot of space, so that was split off to an ‘archive’ site that serves as a place to house all the older talks, some in PDF form, some in one form of HTML & CSS framework or another.

I wanted this to be less maintenance than a CMS-driven site, and cheaper to host, so Zach Leatherman’s Eleventy platform and Netlify were an obvious choice. I’ve worked with both quite a bit, and Zach is just a great human and I’m happy to give him a plug. Building out the site turned out to be pretty straightforward with only a couple of plugins needed to process images and embed videos and code. Super fast and easy to update now, and auto-deploys right to Netlify.

Once I had all the content, I started playing with different type combinations. I knew it I wanted a great reading experience and to lean into everything I’ve been working on over the years. So that meant the fonts had to be variable. I was looking for width, weight, optical size, and italics. I found what I was looking for (shocker) from David Jonathan Ross’ FontOfTheMonth.club: Job Clarendon for headers. Fern Variable for text, Gimlet Sans for UI bits like menu and footer, and Gimlet Sans Mono for code. Basically spent my performance budget here, and I think it’s totally worth it. The site is all about reading & learning, so that’s exactly where I wanted to have the impact.

From there I added in a new project I released in December, 2025 called ‘Shape Outside Linebox’—a web component that does exactly what it says: creates a shape-outside polygon around the text of whatever element you decide, and lets you float text (or anything else) around it. I love the impact it has, and don’t mind the occasional overlaps. The visual interest and tension is worth it.

I also knew I wanted to support dark mode to showcase more of the typographic and design techniques I’ve been thinking about. Font weight is tweaked for body copy, color transparencies help make items work on both light and dark mode, and in all the CSS to support it tops out at about 25 lines so far. And one of those is a super nifty trick I learned from my friend Stephanie Eckles, using a CSS filter to adjust brightness and saturation of images in dark mode to make the a bit less glaring without their feeling dull. Brilliant.

It’s only about a month old, but really happy with how it’s turning out so far.