This website: Technical details

Sunday, 13 May 2018. Update:2020-10-10.

This website is the third rewrite of rdmr.eu. Its precursors were two static hand-coded HTML pages and a short-lived WordPress site.

The current version is written with Jekyll, with the code hosted at GitHub. Jekyll is a static site generator, which means that pages are not rendered by a server-side process. This ensures durability and resilience. A lot of custom programming went into the multiple language support, along with privacy sensitive loading of external content. Tweets, images, videos from other websites are embedded with locally hosted metadata and only load when requested by the website visitor.

Inspired by the talk by Ronan Berder of WiredCraft at the Berlin Static Sites Meetup, I also made [UPDATE: a previous version of this] website trilingual with English, German and Dutch content seperated.

To make the Jekyll setup more usable, a Makefile provides shortcuts for new posts, to run a developer server and to upload a new version of the site. The website is hosted on a small PHP server, so that some interactive server-based options are available, as well.

The CSS is made with Tachyons, a ‘functional’ CSS framework. I was surprised how quickly I could draw up pretty and useful prototypes. For new front-end projects, I’ll now try to work with Tachyons.