Why a New Website?
I have had several websites over the years. My first was probably on Geocities, eons ago. After that I felt clever and built a static website, strayants.com, to collect my poetry, music, and artwork. At the beginning of my web development career, I didn't have as much time for my creative works. That prompted me to create yet another website—something a bit more professional. There were a few iterations of chadkhester.com using versions of Drupal. It mostly hosted my resume, professional background, and portfolio highlights. I had a few blog posts and cocktail recipes. This was a nice playground for Drupal-related functionality and content ideas. As with any version of Drupal, I would need to keep it up-to-date with security releases and major version changes.
Now I want something new. Something that blends my creativity and my professional needs. Enter chadschaos.com, a place where I can put my creations. I already have my company website: mindyte.com, so this new personal website doesn't need to do too much to promote my services. Instead, it embraces my "chaos" with no commitments.
And yea "Chads" and "Chaos" is intentional. Oddly, I borrow this from Sonic the Hedgehog. Back when it was released on the Sega Genesis, one of the goals of the game was to collect the "CHAOS EMERALDS" (yes, it used an all-caps font). It looked a lot like "CHADS EMERALDS" and I thought that was funny.
How is This Website Built?
Similar to my previous website, I am using Drupal (v11 to start), and this give me another playground to experiment with things. This time I'm using a proper deployment workflow with Git and a local development environment. Not that I hadn't with my previous website, but sometimes I'd make changes directly on the live website. A fresh server instance with some automation to help with maintenance is a nice start, too.
The content from chadkhester.com is being copied over here, then I'll set up some redirects for the old domain to point to the new one. The new website has a "Page" content type for landing pages, an "Article" content type for blog posts (like this one), a "Recipe" content type, and a "Portfolio Item" content type. There is a bit of supportive taxonomy for the content and a few Views pages to list content. Since I'm the only person who logs in, there's no need for user profile pages.
What's Next?
Front-end development and theming work isn't my favorite, so my plan is to keep things basic to focus more on the content. I added things to help with SEO and accessibility. Depending on what I do with future content, I plan to add functionality as needed, with intentional releases. Drupal Canvas (formerly known as "Experience Builder") is also high on my priority list to explore here.
I only intend to add content as I feel inspired, with no social commitment. The things that I post here will likely be shared on social channels, so if you're interest, follow me there (links in the footer).