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I have a new podcast about my work as a web developer.

Test, 1, 2, 1, 2. Can you hear me? The microphone is correctly positioned, phantom power is on, let me dust off the pop filter one more time, and then we’re ready to go.

Because of working on web stuff for more than twenty years now, I often think, I know a lot of the common things regarding websites. Well, today I've been proven wrong once again.

Something on this website was bugging me for a long time: The link previews. You know those little boxes showing a title, description and sometimes an image of the website I link to. I wrote a Kirby-Plugin for that – yes, another one.

When you can't find functions in your own code and have to spend a lot of time searching, overengineering might be the reason. I've done a massive cleanup of my site.

While we were working on my colleague Mark's website, my fingers were itching. When working on Mark's website we always used plugins, snippets and parts of my templates - we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. And in the course of the work I noticed two things:

Has building websites become too complicated? We built a Kirby site in just two weeks while my colleague was in China, struggling with a shaky internet connection over VPN.

I keep reading about how complicated it has become to build and launch a simple website. Countless frameworks, bloated CMSs, and complicated deployments. My colleague and I decided to get his new website online as quickly as possible.

At konzentrik, we love to build small and large, useful tools and services designed to make life easier for us and many others. But what’s the point of all that development if no one knows about it?

On my own website, I’ve defined a thematic focus I rarely stray from. Many of our tools have only sporadically fit into this context (like our Crossposter). I pondered for quite some time how to change that.

A little over two weeks ago, I brought it up with Mark. At that time, Mark was in China, with only a mediocre internet connection, and using a VPN didn’t make things any better.

How tailwind made me like CSS again

As I embarked on building websites, layouts were still being created with tables, and design possibilities were limited. Animated GIFs were the highlight of every website. If one wanted a button to change color when hovered over, two images would be created and swapped - that was then.

I worked as a traditional web freelancer for many years, creating countless websites for agencies and private clients. Don't worry; I no longer used tables back then, but instead opted for CSS.

CSS always seemed daunting to me. Much of what needed to be built looked like hacking together disparate parts. Things common on every website had to be clumsily cobbled together - everyone knew the .clearfix hack that eventually became a standard.