Moving into another lockdown - time to build new stuff. This time it's the website!
New Zealand moved into another lockdown—thanks to the Delta variant of the coronavirus. The past few months were busy building systems related to research, and the lockdown put related user studies on hold. With some spare time back on the calendar, it finally made sense to rebuild the website—something that had been postponed for years.
Since the blog was started five years ago, WordPress has been the platform of choice. It did what it needed to do, but it wasn’t very flexible—and it started to feel a bit outdated. The need for a new solution had been there for a couple of years; the lockdown finally created the space to do it.
A new solution
PhD work involves a lot of software development, so building a custom solution isn’t the hard part. The harder part is maintenance, which tends to be more complex than the initial build. So the approach here was to choose a solution that doesn’t require any server-side code: no server-side bugs, fewer security risks, and less maintenance.
Outside of the MagicMirror project, there wasn’t much prior JavaScript experience. Still, a JavaScript-based framework seemed like the right direction in 2021. A quick search surfaced Vue.js; reading further led to Nuxt and Nuxt Content from the Vue community. The appeal was simple: convert static Markdown files into statically rendered pages and make publishing easier.
Some items on the wish list for the new blog:
- Clean design that looks beautiful on both desktop and mobile.
- The option to switch between light and dark themes.
- A way to organize posts - tags and series
- Fast loading time.
- Clean Typography.
- RSS feed
- Means to check the traffic to site
With Nuxt, Nuxt Content, Tailwind CSS, and Netlify, the work started to check all of those boxes.
Website: