Hey, that's my website!

There's an old saying in Venetian dialect that says:

"El scarparo va via coe scarpe rotte"

old Venetian saying

That's our version for: "The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot", and as you can guess, although I've had the skills to build me a website since forever, I never took the time to craft one for myself, until now.

Yes, everything you see, touch, and click, was meticulously thought, designed, written, and coded by yours truly.

TL;DR

• Personal branding
• Website concept, design & development
• Everything handcrafted & knitted with love together

The Idea

First things first: my website needs to represent me, needs to be my voice on the net, and as an ambivert with multiple hobbies & interests, it's no easy feat.

It must convey my personality, my skills, and what I enjoy doing. It has to showcase my digital art to potential buyers, and last but not least, be a vehicle for my opinions & thoughts (even though the blog is still a WIP).

This was the main driver behind every single decision made while building this space.

The design

Having already some ideas in mind, I started experimenting to find what was working best.

I wanted something clean & versatile that I could use not only on my website & personal branding but also in potential side-projects in the future.

After finding the perfect typeface and some colors that would fit me, creating a micro design system for my needs was a breeze.

The stack

I'm a strong advocate of JAMstack & serverless, so the choice was pretty obvious.

In the last years, Vue.js & Nuxt.js were my preferred tools to developed pretty much everything on the web, having said so, at the beginning of 2019 I was (t)asked to learn React for a client's project.

What should I use for my website, then? The familiar libriaries, or something I'm learning to be proficient with?

The latter, of course! I opted to use Gatsby, as it checked all the right ticks:

• Static output & completely customizable
• Fast & with performance in mind
• Large community & tons of plugins available

Gatsby made a promise: to be fast, and oh, boy! It delivered beyond expectations.

Combine it with Netlify hosting and CI, and you have a match made in haven. Add also Netlify CMS to manage your content on the go, and you have the perfect solution for personal website/blog.

Another pro? Netlify free-tiers are generous enough to cover my basic needs, making this website practically free.

The analytics

I was wondering...how could I track visitors being respectful of their privacy?

So I built a simple custom analyitics tool to track unique pageviews anonymously, without collecting any personal data, without the need of cookies, and in full compliance with GDPR.

This is how it works:

1. A complex unique one-way 256-bit hash is created to classify the browser. The hash is irreversible: there's no way to identify the browser or the user from the hash.

   bff23a79b62b2d5d74e621ef55166a786cdc315ae0f050237e250e89cf1cfb68

   hash example

2. The complex hash is saved in a database with some technical data and an estimated location of the visitor for statistical purposes. Neither IP addresses nor any personal information is in any way collected.
3. Finally, each page view is sent to the database along with the complex hash and the timestamp of the hit.

Future development

Even though I'm pretty satisfied with the current result, I plan to keep working on this website in the next future. I still need to finish the blog area where I'm planning on writing my thoughts & share my knowledge. Moreover, I will use this space to keep learning the latest technologies and experiment with newer trends.