People And Websites #4 - Ivan
And here comes the fourth edition of People And Websites brought to you by yours truly! Today's guest is Ivan, a good friend of mine!
Hey! Can you introduce yourself to the readers?
Hey, readers! My name is Ivan, also known as libreivan online.
What's the story behind your website? What made you want to start it? Run me through the whole history!
My website started way back in 2022 when I was known as (ugh) "Wyndix".
From the very start, the goal was to prove that you didn't need a huge stack to build something that was good-looking and accessible.
I made a first prototype in 11ty which used readable.css, which I eventually ditched for a Hugo-based website using the hugo terminal theme (I'm SO glad that wasn't the final revision).
After the Hugo version was scrapped, I rebranded to libreivan and made the website which is being served to this day with the help of Deno and Lume.
It used a heavily modified hard fork of readable.css, which eventually differed so much that I no longer feel it's fair to call it a fork.
(Insert here a screenshot of early libreivan.com)
Eventually, I implemented a "dynamic style" feature, where style was split across different files, allowing the client only to download the required amounts of data.
The website was redesigned a couple of times until it landed on the final revision of the design (version -1).
Additionally, my website provides two secret alternative versions: lite and retro. You can access them by entering libreivan.com/lite and libreivan.com/retro respectively.
Do note the retro version is not meant to look retro, just retro-friendly!
What's your tech stack?
Lume builds the website, and nginx serves the content.
What's your favorite part of having a website?
I get to abandon it!
What got you into tech?
That's... Blog post worthy. But, long story short: I'm a weirdo!
Recommend me a few people that have a really cool website and who I should interview next! What should I ask them?
PLEASE interview David. He's easily my favorite web designer ever, and he's my age, too! A really talented person. Ask him all about his back story.
For every other recommendation you have probably already interviewed them.
This was Day 20 of #100DaysToOffload!