Glastonbury Conservation Society

This is the website for a society in the town where I grew up in the UK.

My dad was a member of this society, and produced their newsletters. At some point he also built them a website. Web wasn’t my dad’s focus, and it was understantably amateur. Once in a while he’d ask me for help with something, and I’d nudge him in the right direction so he could get a chunk of PHP working.

After he died in 2020, maintenance of the website had to go to somebody. Its state made me think it’d likely just be replaced if I were to hand it over as it was, and so lost forever. I didn’t like the idea of that, so I decided to modernize it. It was a good candidate for a static site generator, and that would also mean it could be hosted for free on Netlify.

So I rebuilt it with the Eleventy framework, trying to maintain the look and feel of the site my dad had built. While I was at it I added some improvements – for example, it’s now much more well-behaved on mobile devices, it has a larger more modern text size, it’s more consistent, it has a dark mode, and so on. I then gave access to a new maintainer.

Each of the articles (which my dad had been in the gradual process of archiving from newsletters) was a separate PHP file, each with its own quirks. I have been gradually converting these to Markdown files for inclusion in the rebuild; this process is not yet complete.

The code repository is public on Github.