I presume it was the flu that had me so miserable for two days, and then recovering the next three plus. I’m taking the final two weeks of December off, but I actually worked Monday morning, as I only got one-and-a-half days of work in last week. I really wanted to close that final Jira ticket, even though I don’t know that anyone’s going to actually develop what I designed before January. Either way, I can now have a guilt-free break.

I spent a couple hours this afternoon starting my Eleventy journey. It’s been almost exactly since I did much web development. Last year, I had to decommission my parents’ business web site, as they were retiring, so I took the site off the server space I permanently borrowed from a friend’s Media Temple account (which I hear this week GoDaddy is finally decommissioning the Media Temple brand after acquiring them several years ago, pour one out). They now have a placeholder one-page site at their URL… which eventually I’ll repurpose for myself, since it is my last name.

When you don’t use a local build environment for a year, you mind as well start from scratch, since things change so frequently. Fortunately, several of my friends are full time web developers and can walk me through the layers of nonsense. If you’re reading this and thinking you should learn how to build a site from scratch, do yourself a favor and start at Glitch and don’t leave until you must. I almost switched over today, if I’m honest. But it’s worth the effort to do my new portfolio site locally, if I am able port much of my Jekyll content to Eleventy, since I found a starter kit that has copied the theme/templates of my Jekyll site. I don’t really need to redesign the site, so much as reconfigure where the content is, and update the content from 2018 to reflect what I am up to now.

This is my winter vacation project.