I want to get away from frameworks. I find that frameworks often require a lot of overrides or not enough functionality, especially in a non-static site. Additionally, I find that so-called responsive frameworks, while boasting plenty of features, often lack consistency across devices. For example, on my site, a thick white right border appears on the index page. For the life of me, I can’t debug this, and it’s annoying the crap out of me. So I’ll be rebuilding my personal site and staying away from frameworks to focus on building truly responsive pages. Since Streampost (the platform this blog is built on) is based on MaterializeCSS, I don’t know what the future for that holds. I think for now it’s best to stay with a framework if I want to keep it going because I’m leading a rather busy life as of late; however, I also realize the importance of ensuring a responsive site, and if Materialize isn’t able to achieve that to my specifications, I’d like to step away from it.

Update: It’s now June of 2022

I’m re-reading this about 6 years after writing it and two things are obvious. (1) I wasn’t taking a hard enough look or a good enough crack at using any framework and was expecting a lot out of them and (2) my writing has improved significantly.

I’m currently rebuilding my blog from running on Topik and transferring all my content to WordPress. To do that, I built a theme (based on Pico, which I really like). I never stopped using frameworks. Sure, there were times that I went bare and homespun my own, but I never completely abandoned them for public-facing projects. For a while I liked Materialize, but that got abandoned around 2018. Then I used Bootstrap for a bit, until I didn’t like it, and for about 3 years, I was really heavy in to Bulma, which I still really like – but wanted to try something different that didn’t look like all my client’s sites. Though I still believe that using what you know is good, knowing what you don’t is often better and I’m a fan of figuring out what I’m missing.

This is a long rant to say – I was wrong about this. Frameworks are incredibly useful as a starting point, but yeah, they’re never a one-size-fits-all solution. Bulma is the closest I’ve ever seen and even they miss the mark by a mile.

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