Live Journal

This project began in 2023 as a SvelteKit + Skeleton Labs site and was deployed on Vercel.
As of 2026, it has been intentionally migrated to plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Why the Change

1. Template + Dependency Mismatch

The project was scaffolded from a Skeleton v3-era template, but dependency upgrades pulled in:

• Skeleton v4
• Tailwind v4
• Vite v7

Skeleton v4 removed global CSS, changed imports, and requires a different structure.
Mixing an old template with new packages led to unavoidable build failures.

2. Deployment Friction (Node Versions)

Vercel builds failed with:

Unsupported Node.js version: v24.x
Please use Node 16 or 18

This required Node pinning and adapter configuration for a site that does not need a server runtime. It was overengineered for a very simple setup at the time because I was interested in the skeleton framework but it purely has static content, no backend apis, or auth. Framework tooling added complexity without real benefit.

Current Setup

• Plain HTML
• CSS (Water.css dark theme)
• Alpine.js for minimal interactivity
• Static JavaScript data
• No build step
• No Node runtime
• No framework lock-in

Summary

After ~3 years of dependency churn, the project was simplified to match its actual scope.
For this site, static + minimal JS is the correct tool.