Building a simple website took more effort than anticipated

I took a little break from building Spimeverse itself to put together a really 'simple' website, perhaps with a little mailing list that could be a place to promote the project and let people know how things were going on.

I wanted to use a static site generator so it would be fast and not have any hard dependencies on particular web hosting platforms and could grow along with the project.

After a few false starts fighting with other alternatives. I eventually settled on 11ty. It's a great SSG that doesn't depend on React, Angular or other components. Just a templating language some markdown and a little bit of jscript logic.

Just a simple website and mailing list. what could go wrong?

^{Photo by gify.com}

Well sorta! I've made plenty of websites, in all sort of technologies and so I expected this to a walk in the park. But getting the setup right to generate responsive images, learning exactly how data cascaded data, setting up forms to post to netlify, then realizing I could setup the mailing list directly on buttondown and keep costs down. Wrestling with Dns settings to mail from the Spimeverse domain which I accidentally tried to wire up to SpimeSpace which of course didn't work🤦‍♂️.

The bottom line

Even with well documented and well designed tools. There's still a learning curve to get to achieve what you want. There's always a cost in time and effort for every new technology you add to your toolbelt. Don't ever expect a free lunch! 🍕

But the effort is worth it the Spimeverse.com** website is live and you can now subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with how things are going now I've stopped messing around with the website!

** Actually the original domain name used by the project was SpimeScape but this changed to Spimeverse.com in August 2023