Blog - Juan Fernandes - Freelance Web Designer

I’ve always relied on bookmarks to save useful links — design systems, dev docs, tools, inspiration, articles I want to revisit later.

How I automated my Instapaper “liked” articles into a clean, sorted JSON feed for my 11ty site — with date normalization, HTML stripping, and deduplication, all running daily via GitHub Actions.

As someone who loves clean, static-generated sites, I recently decided to challenge myself: could I build a small online merch store using Eleventy (11ty), Printful’s API, and Stripe—while keeping the setup simple and JavaScript‑free in the templates?

This year in review post has been really difficult to write (and why it's so late) because of how it ended with being the worst year of my life, so far.

Twenty Twenty One was a year of firsts for the family and I after a few years of covid.

What is IR35?

Twenty-Twenty wasn't a good year for a lot of people - except perhaps for Jeff Bezos and all those who profited from the pandemic.

Last month I delved into security headers including Content Security Policies and added a bunch of them to my website.

The Eleventy (11ty) leaderboard benchmarks websites built with Eleventy over time.

Ever since I converted my website to Eleventy - from PHP - I have been obsessively working ton improving its performance.

This is a quick tip showing how I created a sitemap.xml file using Eleventy that will automatically update itself when you create new pages.

I wanted to find a way to dynamically generate a unique Open Graph (OG) image for each blog post or note automatically using post data, the Cloudinary API and Eleventy (11ty) for social sharing.

In my last post, Exploring the benefits of HTTP2, I wrote about removing jQuery and my global.min.js files in favour of loading JavaScript on a per component or partial basis, so only when that component is included on a page it then loads the needed Java…

Now that this website is hosted on Netlify and they serve websites using the HTTP/2 protocol I've started exploring the benefits of it and what I need to change to take advantage of those benefits.

Another year gone but it was a very good year both professionally and personally, but there is room for improvement in twenty twenty.

An existing client asked me to move their blog from /self-help/blog/ to the root of the website - but they wanted to keep the self-help blog, as well as having a blog for general posts and a blog for media related articles, ie press releases etc.

I've been thinking about how I keep track of changes requested by clients, outside of project work.

In this post, I'm going to talk about my adventures with home automation.

I use Git via the command line and have always used it that way ever since it was introduced at a company I worked at a few years ago.

Twenty Eighteen was a good year for me, but not so good for the UK, USA or politics, but we won't talk too much about that here!

Update: I now have a /uses page which will be kept upto date.

Last year was the first time I wrote a year in review post and I've been looking forward to reviewing twenty-seventeen.

I want you to know about my past, my journey as a website designer and how I can help you.

In this blog post, I'm going to break down my process from initial client query to project completion.

One of the things I still get asked to do a lot by clients, ones that don't have a site that is managed by a CMS - is to update their copyright year on the footer.

They must have liked me at G2G3 Digital, because they offered me a permanent role, which I gladly accepted, but working out of their London office, instead of Sheffield.

I wanted to be able to allow a CMS user to add an SVG icon to a sites' SVG Sprite.

Because there is so much content and noise on the web about development theses days, it's difficult to find great resources - it's also very easy to miss hearing about new software or new techniques via social media, and I find newsletters to be a great w…

I’ve decided that 2016 is the year I start writing regular blog posts - and I just about made it, 2017 is just around the corner.