SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
Jake Fowler · 2006 · Web design, Hugo, Automated deploys · Visit the site →
Our own site, and the place we try things out before they go anywhere near a client.
Jake Fowler founded Two Bit Consulting. Twenty-odd years of making technology actually work for the people using it, a philosophy degree that turned out to be surprisingly relevant to IT, and a moustache that recently passed fifteen years old.
Something Out of Nothing is the personal side of that: a blog, photography, collected poetry, travel notes from a dozen cities, and lists of sandwiches, heroes, hats and Shakespeare. It is not a business site and does not pretend to be one.
The writing had been spread across a series of platforms over many years, in the way that writing on the internet tends to be. Some of those platforms still exist. Several do not, and took their contents with them when they went.
That is the whole argument, really. Anything worth having written is worth keeping somewhere you control, and a personal site that lasts twenty years is worth more than an account on a service that lasts three. We have written about this at more length.
We built it with Hugo, a static site generator, and put an automated deploy pipeline behind it. Writing a post means writing a text file and pushing it; the site rebuilds and publishes itself. No login, no editor to fight with, no database.
The alternative was WordPress, which we use happily for clients who need to edit their own pages in a browser. Here it would have been all cost and no benefit — a database to back up, plugins to update and a login page for bots to hammer, in service of a site that one person writes in a text editor anyway.
This is also our test bed. The deploy pipeline pattern, the approach to speed, the caution about tracking — a fair amount of it got tried here first, on a site where a mistake costs nobody anything.
Text first. Generous type, comfortable line length, and a structure that supports a great deal of miscellany without feeling like a filing cabinet.
The nav is deep because the material is genuinely varied, and hiding that would misrepresent the site. Sandwiches sit next to poetry, which is accurate.
Hugo, generating plain HTML, deployed automatically on every push. There is no database and no admin login, which means there is essentially nothing to compromise and nothing to keep patched.
Pages arrive instantly, it works fine on a phone with two bars of signal, and it will still be there when the current crop of platforms is not.
Publishing costs nothing now, which is the difference between a site that gets written and one that gets abandoned. The archive is owned outright and portable.
And it earns its place in this portfolio honestly: everything we recommend to clients about durability, speed and not renting your work from somebody else is something we did to our own site first.
If any of this sounds like your situation, have a look at how we work, or get in touch.
