Website redesign

Published: May 27, 2026

The first iteration of this site lived on Squarespace, a logical place for a website that was heavy on photos. I needed a personal website quickly and was familiar with Squarespace. It included a Data page where I could link to the handful of projects where I was learning R and other data tools.

While it was well-suited for static images, and its drag and drop design system was quick, adding custom html pages, interactive projects or other complexity was problematic. The compromise was to link to those pages and projects on Github Pages instead.

As I started learning JavaScript, the inability to share those projects on site became a bigger limitation. I considered various static-site generators, including some made for R, but wanted to learn a tool with more room to grow. A session on Svelte and Sveltekit during NICAR 26 provided enough incentive to explore them further. They can build a static site but also work well for building data interactives.

I found Josh Collinsworth’s well-detailed post on creating a blog with Svelte invaluable but some syntax was a bit dated. Working through Ali Aslam’s more recent series on Svelte 5 helped close the gap between Josh’s post and current practice.

Welcome to the new site, same as the old site

The new site looks an awful lot like the old site because I was happy with the existing gallery style and site organization. I made some accessibility improvements and changes to the Data page. It used to house a few data-related posts. They’ve now been separated into two pages: Blog and Data.

The Blog section will continue to include posts about techniques and workflows I’ve learned while building projects. They’re a small return for the helpful blogs, forum and Stack Overflow posts I’ve benefitted from through the years. Claude, Codex and Gemini may have ended that approach to problem solving but I find writing remains a good way to reinforce learning.

The Data page is where finished projects or project components live.