Building This Site
larrydanna.com has been offline for years. Here's what I used to bring it back and why.
This site has been offline for a long time. The last version was an ASP.NET MVC app running on a server I was paying for monthly. At some point the value proposition stopped making sense and I let it go.
Coming back to it in 2026, I had a clearer idea of what I actually wanted.
What I wanted
A place for the interactive tools I build for myself. I have a Jeopardy game, a month calendar, a year-at-a-glance, a handful of productivity forms I use regularly. They lived in a folder on my machine. Putting them on a domain means I can get to them from anywhere.
A place to write. Not a Substack, not a Medium account — something I own. The old site had blog posts. A few are worth keeping.
A professional presence. I’ve been writing software since Visual Basic 3. C#, SQL, .NET across three decades of business software. At some point you want a place that reflects that, especially when you’re looking at new opportunities.
And the other things: bluegrass, vintage computing, the C64 projects I’m slowly building.
What I built it with
Astro for the framework. Static site generation, islands architecture for the interactive tools, content collections for blog and tips. It builds to plain HTML and deploys without a server.
Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Free, fast, instant deploys on git push. The site is on their edge network so it loads quickly everywhere.
Vanilla JavaScript for all the tools. No React, no Vue. The Jeopardy game is 447 lines of a single class. The calendar tools are a few dozen lines each. When you don’t need a framework, you shouldn’t use one.
The design system I built from scratch — warm dark background (#0F0D0A), amber accent (#D4863A), Instrument Serif for headlines, IBM Plex Sans for everything else. I was tired of the cold blue-black developer portfolio aesthetic. Every personal site looks the same. This one doesn’t.
What’s coming
More tools as I build them. The 16 remaining toys from the old site that need jQuery removed before they can migrate. Blog posts as I write them. Tips as I accumulate them. The vintage computing section will grow as my 6502 projects develop.
The source is at github.com/larrydanna/larrydanna-2026 if you want to see how any of it works.