Another bloody website?!

Yeah, it’s me again, here with another iteration of my portfolio/blog.

Why

Well, just before Christmas my previous web hosts decided to wipe out my blog. Like, completely wipe it out. They went postal as shit on it. I was admittedly partly to blame for them deleting it but I naturally took to Twitter to air my frustration. The web hosts contacted me and said that it may be possible to recover my site, despite them saying otherwise in the email sitting in my spam folder. They couldn’t. The good news, however, is that I’m a web developer so I’m used to backing up sites and following best practices. Did I back up my site? I did not.

I wanted my site back so I decided to rebuild it from scratch because I'm a knob. So here we are. Version 10 of my site some 10 years (technically 11 but that doesn’t work for what I’m about to say) after I started building websites so it felt fitting that I look at v1 and build this in its image.

What you’re seeing is a “back to roots” Kieran McClung Website. Grey and pink is back, baby! It’s got some of my writings, now with links to external outlets, it’ll feature bits I’ve designed and drawn (more coming soon) and it’ll also showcase some of my meatier projects (watch this space for some “exciting” projects in 2020).

It better represents what I do so maybe the deletion of years of blog posts was meant to be. Probably not but I’ve got to keep telling myself something at the risk of crying myself to sleep at the loss of all that subpar content. I do that enough as it is.

How

This is all nerdy web stuff from here on so feel free to skip it if you literally couldn't give any less of a shit. My new site is built using GatsbyJS and hosted on Netlify. These are two things that I'd never heard of before November of last year so it obviously made sense to build an entire site using them.

Fortunately I had help from my good friend Andy who was also on the Gastby/Netlify adventure and quite helpfully created a bunch of starter projects which can be found on his GitHub! Using these as reference, I crafted the new website you see before your very eyes.

Was it painless? Definitely not.
Would I use it again? Maybe.
Am I happy with the end result? Pretty much!
Will I do a post about it? Watch this space (not the one at the top of the page)!