Mark Andrade Website
Story
Having developed websites and apps for three decades has fortunately helped me with transitioning into photography.
I wanted a simple site that acts as a blog and portfolio without all the bloat of a CMS like WordPress. I also didn't want to be tied down to a service. I wanted the freedom to move the site to new servers if needed. I also wanted a layout that wasn't the same as all the templates available to everyone.
I set out to build my own.
Tech
The website is built with Eleventy as a static site.
I didn't want to use services like Squarespace and the like. Don't get me wrong, those sites are great and I even recommend them to people all the time.
Being a developer for such a long time I wanted to control everything about site. The best way for me to do that is to do it myself.
Front page is a [blog]. Clicking on the arrows cycles through each individual post.
The Photogram page in my photo feed. Clicking on the grid button displays the photo posts as a flex grid. The grid layout was taken directly from the CSS Tricks page Adaptive Photo Layout with Flexbox.
The Flexbox layout has issues where if an image does not load correctly it screws up the flow. This layout is temporary until I build a better grid.
In it's current state the grid view works since there aren't that many posts. I can see it becoming an issue in the future though. I'm already testing different layouts.
From Shared Server to Netlify
Initially the site was hosted on a shared server by a popular hosting brand. That brand is still great and the shared server approach worked for me for a very long time. I needed something new that better suited my workflow.
That's where Netlify came in. It's super easy to deploy. I sync with GitHub. It's then auto-magically built, and deployed. It's fast and affordable for my needs. It's on Github so it's backed up from my computer. I highly recommend. (I'm not affiliated with Netlify in any way. I just like using it — so far.)
To Do
This is an ongoing list of things that I want to add or update on the site. Some things might happen. Others might just be a bad idea. Some ideas I might just lose interest in. Items that I have added will be moved to the Updates section. Items I killed will be crossed out.
- Add search
- Add keyboard control to nav back and forth on blog (maybe)