Personal websites are living things and are never really finished. There is always something to tweak, to optimize, or to experiment with.

Over the last several months on ersatz.website I've made some changes to the site's stylesheet to fix some accessibility issues, restructured it a bit to make it easier to modify, and other related changes. I made some good changes, but I had a difficult time making them. My HTML markup across my 11ty static site templates was inconsistent, and my CSS often combined structure rules with presentation rules. This made things confusing to read, and a little risky to change. Overloaded CSS rules and inconsistent markup make things brittle and easily breakable. I could fix things in the context of what I was looking at, but unkowingly break something elsewhere. This kind of thing can happen over long periods of time as markup and styles are added and removed.

I could have developed some basica automated browser tests for myself so I could do a lot of editing and refactoring and ensure I didn't break anything while I was working, but that would be a lot of work just to maintain the same design.

Instead of developing some kind of tedious automated test suite that would blow up on any visual regressions in a fantastical effort to keep things exactly the same, I decided I should do a redesign and start from a fresh place.

I've recently updated the splash page of ersatz.website after I read a blog post by Amy Goodchild called "Early Computer Art In The 50's and 60's". In the article, Goodchild catalogues some early uses of the computer as an artistic medium. I found this post inspiring and fascinating because clarified for me the core idea of generative art: emergence.

I wrote a README for how to manage ersatz.website and it was out of date and wrong. I caused an outage on accident because of it.

I have created a collection of links to cool websites, blogs, digital gardens, and other resources that I enjoy or find useful.

The first post of the mattyblog/ersatz blog.