The mighty fairchild.tech had been collecting dust as a bare-bones HTML listing of images and stories from our trip around the world, and I decided it was time for a refresh. I wanted to have a place to post more types of content and wanted to clean up the look a bit.

Here are some screenshots from our original site.

I had tried this task a few times before and settled on just going bare CSS & HTML instead of diving deep in the Javascript and using a framework like Vue or React which I am used to having at work. I also wanted it to be something as dependency-free as possible and something I developed myself as much as possible.

Before settling on Angie I had tried just writing every new HTML file by hand. I got a few locations into the new site and realized I didn't have the heart for it. Not only was the copy-paste absolutely mind-numbing, the new site was very difficult to modify. If I made a change to how some common component was built I had to go make that tweak in every file. This wasn't going to scale and my days were now full of childcare, so I gave up and the refresh went back into hibernation.

Now, several months later, I have picked back up the torch and decided to pair this project with another long-term goal of mine, learning Rust. Although at the time of this writing the implementation is incredibly naive, poorly organized, and fairly inflexible; I am happy to say I have something working. I have learned a lot about Rust with this simple intro-project, and look forward to improvements to come in the site.

To provide another snapshot into the past, here is what Angie looks like at the time of writing.