Minimum Viable Website

My wife and I have been downsizing much of our junk over the last year and I've been looking to trim off any unnecessary commitments. I closed my business a while ago and figured my hosting was somewhere I could make a dent. After roughly 5 years I'd been paying for legacy PHP support for some old Wordpress sites that I either couldn't offload or could take down for one reason or another and they were needing some upgrades was a result of both laziness and lack of appetite.

About 2 years ago I went through some disaster recovery which blew away my local environments and whilst I have some solid local back ups simply upgrading plugins and deprecated methods wasn’t a quick and easy win. In the end I spent a month of weekends reinstalling my local LAMP stack, meticulously fixing my old wordpress sites just to save a few bucks every month.

And I found myself looking at my old portfolio... I had the foresight to use minimal tools and libraries and yeah, I was super proud it. It was fun, had some of my personality and it got me work. What did else did it need. Now, I claim to know a few things about web accessibility and my old folio was heavily motion based, so much so it could make you sick. I wanted in to add a prefers-reduced-motion flag but when I tried to spin it up it was riddled with security holes and no longer maintained dependencies.

When I tried to add secure certificates (I mean, what year is it) my previous host could provide them but for £50 a month, per website (apparently OpenSSL wasn't an option). I was locked in. I took a step back, realised that it was no longer fit for purpose and just took it down.

So here we are. This website is an experiment in using only what I need. It's something for me. Somewhere to explore the challenges I face every day in the world of. And sure, there'll be some food related things coming soon.