Colophon
The technical and creative processes behind this website.
Tech stack
This site is built using the static site generator, Eleventy.
Page content and blog posts are written in Markdown, saved in Markdown (.md) files and then compiled into static HTML files. Dynamic templating is done using Nunjucks and Liquid templating languages.
Design
The design is my own creation. I was keen to avoid using black and white so opted for slightly more yellowish and bluish shades. I've tried to keep it all as simple and easy to understand as possible.
Avatar
This has involved a number of tools. The starting point was a photo of me taken on my laptop's webcam. I passed this to ChatGPT and asked it to create a cartoon version. After a few tries I found one I was happy with. I then asked for some touch-ups, making me more grey like real life. I then fed this static image into Veo, Google Gemini's video creation tool and asked it to animate the image into a short video. I used Ezgif to convert the video file into a gif. I then used this tool further to optimize it by removing frames, reducing colours, making it smaller until it was a file size that I was happy with. As a final step I decided that I'd load just the tiny static image first then use JavaScript to replace it with the gif after everything has finished loading, to keep the initial load as fast as possible. If the script doesn't run, no problem. It's an enhancement.