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Jack Mac ’87

A few weeks ago, I finally shared the link to this website, Jack Mac ’87 – my personal site.
I kept putting it off and noodling away on the site instead of sharing it – I found it very nerve-racking for some reason. I guess that’s because it’s sharing a bit more about myself, intentially so.
Anyway, I thought I’d do a short write-up about the site here.

Domain Name

After spending some months pondering over a domain name that I liked, I finally landed on jackmac87.com. The ‘Jack Mac’ part is similar to ‘Jack McC’ (my first name and start of my surname), I like Apple Macs, and I was born in 1987. I chose .com over .co.uk becuase it felt more ‘old-web’-like.

Custom Theme

The site is built using a custom WordPress ‘classic’ theme, as opposed to an FSE (full site editor) theme, using Bootstrap as the framework. There are hardly any plugins in use. I’m using Sass for the CSS and loading only what I need from Bootstrap. I’ve avoided using jQuery as far as possible, so it’s dequeued on every page except for a few. I’ve concentrated on striking a balance between loading few resources, and making this site look ‘nice’ – it’s amazing what you can do with SVGs, CSS, and some vanilla javascript.
The whole site is cached and scores between 99 and 100/100 for everything in Lighthouse and has an A+ rating for being green and carbon efficient.

Design

Most of the design took place in the browser, with a little being done in Sketch. Fortunately, I somewhat knew what I wanted to do so didn’t spend much time hunting for inspiration. I customised Bootstrap’s dark theme to give a “late-night-cocktail-bar-that-plays-synthwave” vibe. Not sure if that comes across or not. I have plans for customising Bootstrap’s light theme too but with a completely different colour scheme and feel. I’m looking forward to working on that when I get a chance. The design and functionality is simplistic, possibly bland, but it’s a good starting point for future development, and easy to maintain and add to. The site makes use of post formats for images, statuses, and standard posts.

Content

The site mostly consists of old blog posts that have been rescued from various xml exports from long-gone experimental WordPress blogs that I’ve started and abandoned over the past 16-years. There are also some incomplete posts that were rescued, via Wayback Machine, from my old business site, back when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take the agency or freelancer angle with my business and so used the site’s blog as a bit of everything. Eventually I went down the agency avenue so removed all the old posts. Some of them, sadly, are completely gone and just not available anywhere.
There are also over 23,000 tweets from my imported Twitter archive here, but just not viewable yet. I’m not sure if i’ll ever expose them but felt this site was a good place to import them to. They are, and were, content, after all. I’m also planning on doing the same with Mastodon toots but haven’t found a way to import them and then keep them updated automatically yet.
I’ve always been somewhat against sharing video directly on WordPress sites, as opposed to uploading them to YouTube or Vimeo, and then embedding them, but I may add some videos, particularly if they contain copyrighted music that YouTube would complain about, and I’ll definitely be adding more photo posts as time goes on.

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