Chuck Aligbe

New year, new website. Welcome to my new portfolio and blog, chuck.aligbe.com. I have officially retired the "Dezaïn" brand, and my new brand is myself. I want to keep it simple and make a good first impression on people finding me now. This new website is a repository of my product design work, explorations into design, and thoughts about what I experience in the world. My desire for chuck.aligbe.com is to stake a fun little corner of the web for me that I hope others can share and enjoy.

The new website is also a new learning experience for me. I ditched WordPress (which powered my website for over a decade) for a static site generator. A static site generator (SSG) is a cool software that takes special HTML template files, content written in Markdown, and style sheets, and then converts them into pure HTML, CSS, and JS. This produces lightweight, quick-loading, secure websites, without all of the plugins and bloat associated with typical content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. There are lots of SSGs out there – Hugo, Jekyll, Astro. However, I am kind of a control freak, so I decided to make my own*.

Chuck.aligbe.com is powered by Papyrus, a static site generator written in Python that I adapted from Cacty.py. Cacty.py, a SSG created by Claudio Santini, is a super simple Python script that turns HTML templates written in Jinja2 and Markdown into webpages. It's short at 90 lines, but insanely powerful. After playing with it and expanding it to build these two websites, I rewrote it.

Papyrus uses classes to manage the data it passes into templates to render. This makes it modular and extensible, as I was able to add category taxonomy and a portfolio page type to the SSG. As Markdown is also pretty robust, I can use this to approximate a WordPress experience, without having to deal with PHP, full site editing, or server-side rendering. In other words, the generated website is blazing fast.

And since the output is simple, semantic HTML, it's super easy to style with CSS and add interactivity in JavaScript. Making my own SSG was honestly much easier than trying to understand someone else's (aside from Cacty.py). Hopefully, this platform will make it much easier to keep chuck.aligbe.com up-to-date with new content for my followers.