Step 1: Buy a domain. You might have a problem if you already have 20 domains waiting to be used, but that's okay. Feel free to buy more domains. You never know when you might need that perfect domain name. P.S. zeit.co has a great domain search tool with hacks. Now I've just enabled your habit. You're welcome.
Step 2a: Engage in Twitter debates about how JavaScript is ruining the web and which static site generators are best. Do this for 4 months.
Step 3: Take an entire course to get better at design. Spend 5 hours generating an HSLa exploration CodePen to visualize something that already exists. Bemoan color systems and values. Read a shout-out tweet about best conference talks that happen to be about React and color. Find a tool that does it way better than you.
Step 2b: Eventually some rando will tell you about Eleventy, and you're like "sounds brilliant". Repeat step 2a.
Step 4: Clone that starter repo and fire it up. Waste 17 hours trying to figure out how to implement some esoteric design feature no one will notice. "Fuck, it's midnight on a Friday, why am I still doing this?" On Monday, "add a circle".
Step 5: Let's do dark mode.
Step 6: (Six hours later) Let's not do dark mode.
Step 7: Look at other people's sites in envy.
Step 8: Write the actual content.
Step 9: Join the Learn with Jason livestream on variable fonts. "Oh that's cool, must add."
Step 10: Edit the color scheme 20 more times. Play with the design and variable fonts. Open Firefox because the font dev tools are 🔥. Go blind because Firefox oversaturated the colors. Recover from blindness, and edit the colors again.
Step 11: Sees how CSS Tricks implemented dark mode and admire how well they did it. Silently close the tab.
Step 12: Launch! Ugh, non-responsive iframes and bad break points. Run Axe. Feel like a terrible person. Fix issues (and edit colors again).
Step 13: 5 months later, write a blog post.
Note to self: next time, just hire a designer.
This article was originally published on sia.codes. Head over there if you like this post and want to read others like it, or sign up for my newsletter to be notified of new posts!
Top comments (13)
LOL!
This entire post is eerily accurate
Oh no! I just spent two weeks of spare time rewriting my blog with Gatsby but after reading this I want to do it all over with eleventy!! And of course I can totally relate to this post: the degree of perfectionism that kicks in when working on a side project like a blog is so unnecessary, and yet I can't help it!
So right!
hahahaha, Step 6 almost killed me with laughter, I think an unicorn is in order. And I don't "unicorn" lightly :)
By the way, when should spend hours figuring out why one element is 2px misaligned? just to change everything the day after? or the hours finding the perfect shade of blue, just to find out that #0000FF looks better?
Lol thanks! And yes, I have been there too. 😄
I suspect a number of people here now feel personally attacked.
Step 7. Every. Day.
Step 4 hurts me on a deep level.
Don't forget to write three support libraries to do basic things, and learn how to publish Python packages.
Step 4 & Step 12 - ummmm so that's why project managers are stressed out 🤭
This is perfect. Eleventy ftw.
Lol you're welcome. I have also now joined that tribe of rando Eleventy pushers.