Armand Philippot

A new website

Published on:
Author:
Armand Philippot
Reading time:
3 minutes
Category:
Changelog

Table of Contents
  1. Introducing armand.philippot.eu
    1. My technical choices
    2. Content types
    3. Features
  2. What’s next?
    1. Improving my development experience
    2. Automating the build process
    3. Rethinking the blog posts organization
    4. New features

After about fifteen years of using my old domain name (armandphilippot.com for the record), I decided to start from scratch. It’s now time to present you the first version of armand.philippot.eu; welcome!

Introducing armand.philippot.eu

My technical choices

With this new website, I’m saying goodbye to Next.js and WordPress. I choose to build a static website, or almost. Thanks to Astro, I can have a static website with API routes to deal with some features like the contact form.

My contents are written with Markdown using the MDX format to extend my formatting options a bit with the help of Remark/Rehype plugins and custom components.

Speaking of components, the ones that required a bit of interactivity are build using Web components. With Astro, the template is easy to write : you just need to write an Astro component inside your custom tag. Then, all you need to do is to implement the interactivity with Javascript.

For the search feature, I’m using Pagefind which can build an index for static websites. In the future, I’d like it to be better integrated in my design but for now, as long as it serves its purpose it’s good enough!

Content types

I chose to divide my contents by type. Currently, you will get access to:

  • guides: a somewhat long format that includes step-by-step procedures to achieve a result,
  • notes: some raw contents (meaning unstructured, bordering on draft) for my personal usage before all,
  • bookmarks: some links I find interesting and I want to share or to save to find them again later,
  • a blogroll: some links to personal websites I like to read,
  • a blog (posts and dedicated categories): I’ll publish there contents that doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere,
  • some tags: you can retrieve the different content types on a same page filtered by topic.

This structure could evolve later if I choose to introduce new types of content.

Features

I haven’t added anything fancy. I want a simple content-driven website before all. So the features are the following:

  • a contact form,
  • a search field available next to the menu,
  • some settings allowing you to update:
    • the language (English or French),
    • the website theme (light or dark),
    • the code blocks theme (light or dark) independently of the website theme.

This website is bilingual. However, the translation or the rewriting in English will not be necessarily available at the same time as the French version. Writing takes time, so translating/rewriting (without using an automatic translator) takes even more time. Another point that seems important to me: in the future, some content may be exclusive to a language… I will decide on a case-by-case basis if the opportunity arises.

What’s next?

Improving my development experience

Currently, I’m okay with my choice of technologies. However, I know I have some technical point to improve. I have some issues in development mode. Thankfully they are not blocking to build my website. So I’ll will first search how to improve that.

Automating the build process

I’m not using an host provider like Vercel or Netlify - that allowed to rebuild my website depending on my repository activity - but a VPS. So I’d like to implement something similar (but not necessarily as accomplished) instead of having to rebuild my website manually with each new content. I think that without automating this aspect, I risk getting bored and not posting as often as I would like.

Rethinking the blog posts organization

Blog posts are not meant to be updated (unless a typo or a broken link). So I think another organization could be helpful at least to organize myself.

If I’m doing that, I think I will add some archive pages! They could be helpful to easily find a blog post by date. This change also implies a change in the URL of the page. I’m still hesitating between a classification by year only (/blog/2025/new-website) or by year and by month (/blog/2025/01/new-website). I’ll think about it.

New features

I’d like to add a comment management system and to explore the idea of Webmentions. It’s not urgent, but this is an idea I want to keep in mind for later.

What’s next? Well, I think all I need to do is to add more contents to this website!