eSolia Colophon

History

As they say, we “stand on the shoulders of giants”, and this site is certainly no exception. We have built previous eSolia sites in Rapidweaver, Wordpress, Typo3, Drupal, or Hugo, and while all these website build systems had advantages of course, each had some fragility related to upgrades or dependencies.

Static Site Generators

Wanting to move from a database backed site builder to something else back in 2018, we considered various SSGs or “static site generators” that help you weave a website together from content files, style files, script programs, and image files. The SSG Hugo is an excellent system and very fast at building a site, but we wanted something that would allow us to focus our development effort on the Typescript language. We looked into a few and selected Lume.

Deno and Lume

Lume is a modern static site generator built on Deno, about which we learn:

Lume is the Galician word for fire, but also a static site generator for Deno. It’s inspired by other static site generators, such as Jekyll or Eleventy, but it’s faster, simpler and easier to use and configure, with no package.json or complex bundlers.

The reason Lume is so powerful is it’s built on Deno, a modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that’s secure by default. Deno provides excellent TypeScript support out of the box, built-in testing, formatting, and linting tools.

Lume is eSolia’s preferred SSG.

So, a hearty “domo arigato” to Lume creator Óscar Otero (@oscarotero), the Deno team led by Ryan Dahl, and the fantastic contributors to both projects.

Site Look

The look of this site comes from a couple of different components.

First, the stylistic base of the site uses Tailwind CSS. About Tailwind:

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework packed with classes that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup.

It allows you to have consistency in your basic styles, responsiveness to support mobile users, and acts as a great starting point for any site design.

As for Type Faces, we use IBM Plex Sans JP for optimal performance and readability across all devices.

The icons you see are from Phosphor Icons.

The photos and most graphics on this site are by Rick Cogley, unless otherwise noted.

Data

For dynamic content like news posts and project information, we pull data from our company ERP system running on PROdb, our cloud database. The Info Request form pushes info to a table in PROdb as well, to allow for some automation.

Hosting

This site and its Japanese counterpart are hosted on Netlify. DNS is managed through Cloudflare for robust and fast DNS resolution.

The repository for this site is hosted at Github.

We’re Humans(.txt)

We also have a humans.txt file. Humans.txt is an attempt to standardize on a way of making a site colophon, in text format, and plays upon the robots.txt files that give directives about your site, to the search engine crawler programs that index it.

Click it, and you’ll see the same basic information as on this page, in a simple text only form.

Thanks!

Sites don’t always properly acknowledge contributions, but believe us, every site on the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to many parties, other than the company that did the site design.

We leveraged Claude Code for efficient site development and content optimization.

Finally, thanks also to team eSolia for the many hours working on content.

Now to get back to business!