How and why I made this website
2025 NOTE : This post is outdated. I have remade this site again from scratch using a different static site engine called lume : 🔗lume.land
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.
The source code is at https://github.com/arkydon/aerxi
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 tried bearblog but it was too restrictive for what I wanted to make so I decided to build my own website using Zola.
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 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 for styling was not easy, 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: 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.