Keeping it simple

I’ve had a personal website in some form since I started using the Internet, although it was in 2000 that it grew into something of any substance. The passion I discovered for hills and mountains, or more generally any wild area, gave me a topic I wanted to photograph, write about and, most importantly, share.

As life moved on the necessities of work took over and I had less time in the wilderness that has provided me with so much inspiration. With this the website stagnated and at times was barely functional. Numerous aborted attempts were made to resuscitate it, but each only succeeded in leaving it more disjointed and unfinished. The desire was always to try the latest technologies, using them to produce idealised systems that would scale to cover every need I could imagine. However instead this achieved little more than producing empty shells, missing the most important element, content.

So now, after so many false starts, I come to a new attempt and there are a few simple principles that I have learnt over the years working on the web that I am aiming to follow.

Don’t solve problems you don’t have

This has been a principle I have tried to use in my work life since reading an article by Rachael Andrew — Stop solving problems you don’t yet have. Whilst I have several ideas of what I want this site to grow into and also a good idea of some of the technologies I will implement to achieve them, I will only solve each problem as I actually face it. What this means is that as I start this there is no more code involved in creating this website than the HTML and CSS I am adding as I write this article. No build process, no templates, no framework, no database. Each will only be added to solve problems as I face them.

Don’t break what the browser gives you by default

As web developers working to make our websites responsive, accessible and performant we often forget that they start that way until we break them. The linear flow of HTML works across all screen sizes until we add CSS to create more complex layouts. Everything performs well until we add code to slow them down. As such I will aim to code sparingly and not create problems that I will only need to solve later.

Prioritise the content

This time I’m starting as I first did all those years ago, with the content. It’s already got me further than I’ve got with my website in several years, here’s hoping that continues.