Meta – Chuck Grimmett

This is a page about how this website works and a rough history.

This site is powered by WordPress and hosted at Pressable. It uses a child-theme of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme generated with Create Block Theme. All templates are created with the Site Editor. I have some very minor custom CSS (roughly 50 lines), mostly relating to my footer animation and some mobile styles for the navigation.

Here is a list of the plugins I use: My WordPress Plugin List

History

2007-2008: Handcrafted HTML

I registered this domain on 2007-05-26. I was 17 and a junior in high school. I put up a handcrafted HTML page. That very first version is lost to time. The Wayback Machine has a copy of the HTML, but not the CSS.

Fortunately, I started making my own backups a couple months later when I decided to start a blog. Here is that first handcrafted blog and the corresponding homepage:

The pelicans were from a photo I took in South Carolina with my old Konica Minolta. Apparently, according to my own posts in the screenshot above I actually tried WordPress in December 2007 but had some issues with it and returned to handcoded HTML. I had forgotten about that.

During this time the site was hosted at GoDaddy.

2008-2013: WordPress

On June 22, 2018, I was in a room at the Doubletree in Tarrytown, NY. It was a Friday and it was the beginning of the weekend in-between my first FEE seminars. I ordered a pizza and some ziti from Capri Pizza and decided to tear down my old HTML site and give WordPress a try again. I installed WordPress 2.5.1 and went to town. The theme I used was Default and I hacked to pieces. My first taste of WordPress templating. I opted to install the blog in the /blog folder.

The homepage that went along with this version (Amanda said this is still what she thinks of as my website):

During this time the site was hosted at GoDaddy.

2013-2015: HTML Landing Page

I revamped my landing page in 2013 and took off the link to my blog (though it was still accessible). Most of my blogging during this time was over at https://cooklikechuck.com.

2015-2017: Jekyll

I wanted to start blogging on cagrimmett.com again and I wanted something new, so I went with Jekyll. The idea of dynamically generating the site locally and then serving just static HTML files was appealing.

The new version of the site went live in September 2015.

During this time the site was hosted at A Small Orange.

I found that I really liked Liquid templating and I released a bunch of Jekyll tools on GitHub: https://github.com/cagrimmett/jekyll-tools

I used Disqus for comments, added book reviews during this time, and blogged multiple times a week in the Today I Learned section. My search was javascript-based.

Here is what the TIL section looked like in 2016:

2017-2020: Still Jekyll, but on S3

In 2017 I moved my site hosting to S3 + Cloudfront, which I wrote about here: https://cagrimmett.com/2017/04/08/migrating-jekyll-to-s3-cloudfront/

In early 2018 I redesigned the site to have a sidebar and imported all of my old WordPress posts into the Jekyll site, which I wrote about here: https://cagrimmett.com/2018/01/21/website-rebuild-and-revival/

During this period I also set up a separate microblog on WordPress (installation was in May 2017 according to my email) at micro.cagrimmett.com. This foreshadowed my future of both moving back to WordPress and microblogging. Here is a post I wrote about building my microblog theme: https://cagrimmett.com/2017/05/13/wordpress-simple-microblog-theme/

Late 2020-2022: Back to WordPress

I started working at Automattic in March 2020 (yeah, those early pandemic days were wild.) My job involved building WordPress sites daily, so it began to feel strange that my own site was still on Jekyll. By November 2020 I moved back to WordPress, hosted at Pressable.

I wrote about the process of moving from Jekyll to WordPress here: https://cagrimmett.com/2020/11/11/switching-from-jekyll-back-to-wordpress/

I used the Wilson theme by Anders Norén and customized the styling. I like sidebars.

During the pandemic I started writing about various projects I had done over the previous couple years, but hadn’t written about because there was too much friction with Jekyll. The goal of moving to WordPress was to make it easy to publish posts.

2022-2023: Full Site Editing Theme

In 2022 I decided to rebuild my site with the Site Editor to learn more about it. I used the Twenty Twenty-Two theme. I scrapped the sidebar for some reason.

I was on parental leave after Charlie was born and had time for website experimentation during his frequent naps. I started my weekly updates and microblog during this time.

During the very end of that period, here is what the site looked like:

2024: Simplify and bring back the sidebar

I wanted something simpler with a sidebar again. I wanted to stick with the Site Editor, so I used a child-theme of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme generated with Create Block Theme. I used some very minor custom CSS (roughly 50 lines), mostly relating to my footer animation and some mobile styles for the navigation.

Also, I finally dropped the category slug from my URL. About time.

Here is a post I wrote about this redesign: https://cagrimmett.com/2024/01/21/2024-redesign/