How and why I made this website

I made this website because I wanted a personal space on the web where I can share and store every useful and non-useful, personal and non-personal piece of information.

I used a static site generator called Zola - a tiny ~25MB single binary (exe) tool. The structure of the website was writen with a templating language called Tera.

I had already made a website using a custom theme as the base which I modified until I finished making an initial final version of my website 🤷. The problem was that the code was a mess - terrible CSS code, confusing random variable names everywhere, lots of repeated code and also a lot of templating code that I didn't need or had no idea what they did. There was also many parts of the website that I didnt understand how they worked.

I decided to make the entire website again from scratch without using any theme as the base. Thanks to the internet, the docs and Copilot, Meta, Gemini and Claude I was able to slowly make a new website. Making the structure of the website took only a few days but styling it took longer because I only have a basic idea of CSS.

Choosing the right colors was such a chore the colors looked completely different on my laptop compared to my phone.

I finally finished a design I liked which I thought was going to be the final design but I've changed the design more than a dozen times since them. Generating the website from the code was almost instant, thanks to Zola's speed.

Hosting: The website is hosted in Cloudflare Pages, which is free and also provides a free ".pages.dev" custom domain.

Graphics: The favicon and various graphic icons were taken from Flaticon, from the icon and sticker packs made by Darius Dan

Fonts: Acumin Pro

Planned:

  • Fix how it looks on widescreens.
  • Compress and convert all the images to webp.
  • Make a mascot for the website.
  • Tweak dark mode.
  • Implement more markdown shortcodes.

[Edited: Dec 2024]

Completely redid the design of the website again 🤷. Changed the header, and decided to pick a simple and basic colour scheme. Chnaged the fonts.