I’ve remade and expanded the website. There’s a bunch of new content and changes “under the hood”, and I’ve broken down the changes as follows:

Courses

The biggest change is that I now have a courses section of my portfolio. At present, there’s 174 courses I’ve either developed, managed, taught, or directly supported.

I did have some of them logged on my older Wordpress website, but never got around to them for this version of the site. And after three years…well, it’s probably about time I actually did. Making courses is my day job after all.

It’s not a complete list, and I still have a number of archived emails, project files, etc. to go through…but it’s a start.

Research

I’ve similarly added a research section of my portfolio.

Again, it’s likely not a complete list, and I’ll have to spend some more time digging through my archives.

Actually using Astro

I’ve also redone the entire website to leverage Astro more.

When I moved from Wordpress back in 2023 and built this version of the site, I esentially just leveraged Astro for its components and layouts features. However, I never used collections, which basically which basically means all the content was hand-coded HTML wrappoed in .astro files.

Which, it turns out, is not the most efficient approach when you’re trying to add 170+ courses entires to the site.

I’ve made every new course and research entry using markdown, which meant it took far less time than it would have previouly. I’ve also gone back and remade all the other pages using markdown. In fact, this blog post uses markdown.

The site has been upgraded from Astro 3.3.2 to Astro 7.3, now utilizes frontmatter tags so that you can dynamically sort the course entires by my involvement, CSS has been tweaked, and there’s a new mobile menu. I’m also now using the rehype-external-links plugin to open external links in a new tab, because moving from pure HTML to markdown files made that an issue.

Next steps are to somehow compress all the images I added…