Building this site

garden budding medium active Tended Mar 2026 Mar 2026

#meta #web #tools

A personal website organized around the metaphor of a dacha. Different zones serve different purposes:

Veranda — book notes and reflections
Garden — active projects being worked on
Greenhouse — early fragments not ready for full posts
Cellar — a time-indexed log of what happened when
Workshop — tools I use or built
Well — resources and links worth drawing from

Stack: Eleventy 3.x for static site generation, Vite + React for tools embedded as iframes. No JavaScript framework on the site itself — just HTML and CSS served fast.

Why dacha? The metaphor maps well to how content actually works: a dacha has different spaces for different purposes — a veranda for reading, a garden for active work, a greenhouse for fragile seedlings, a cellar for archives. Some things are fully grown (evergreen), some are being actively tended (budding), and some are just seeds (seedling).

Current status: Local MVP complete. Domain purchased (digitaldacha.com). Next: self-host on Raspberry Pi 5.