My domain registrar did a very sneaky thing and sent me a discount code for .ninja domains. I impulse bought doyleyoung.ninja and for a while I wasn't sure what to do with it. I decided to do an all grey scale site with a time line that documents my life as a lover of technology. In keeping with the theme of the site, I thought it would be interesting to incorporate new libraries and techniques that I haven't used in the past.
The first new tool I decided to use is Foundation instead of Bootstrap. Foundation lets you customize your build and since it was my first time I took the kitchen sink and just changed my color palette. I found a time line template that fit the look and feel I was going for and added it to the basic site. I then added an icon bar for my navigation and found some great Creative Commons, SVG icons on flaticon to complete the ninja look.
The content in the time line is made up of a description and a number of detail lines containing links. This structure is perfect for a semantic template library. I looked at the competing libraries in the space and selected handlebars. I was able to drop it right into the site and convert the initial test entries to the template structure. I then used the handlebars precompiler which reduces both the client side load and reduces the runtime size.
Finally, I used minify to shrink both my JavaScript and my CSS files. I selected it because it was a quick npm install away and it had the easiest command line syntax I could find (or imagine):
minify file1 file2 file3 > minified.output
If only all impulse purchases ended up being so worth while and interesting.