Site history

I love to redesign my personal website. This site has been through countless iterations. I've not been able to keep track of every iteration I've ever done, but this page is an attempt to at least keep track of the more recent changes I've made to my personal site.

First blog

I started blogging a long time ago, when I learned about Jekyll and markdown. A lot of those posts have been lost in the ether and I just used stock themes at that time. This wasn't a particularly interesting part of my site history, I just used whatever I ran into and used Jekyll for everything, because deploying with github pages was so easy.

First theme

I love customizing my stuff, just so it feels more like mine. It was just a matter of time until this came for my blog. My first theme was just a blog, nothing more. I used the nord color scheme for the coloring and just created the simplest interface I could think of. This was mostly inspired by the programmer blogs I ran into a lot on the internet, which are very simple and don't have a lot of things going on. After a few years, I learned about the Indie Web, which caused a major rewrite after this generation.

TUI theme

Inspired by all the crazy indie web stuff I ran into, I wanted to create a theme that also felt like it reflected me. I took a look at a lot of different sites and saw that there really is any good way to do this. After a while I decided to go for a TUI-like theme, because I love the terminal and thought it'd be a good reflection of me as a person.

I also made the decision to allow people to choose their own theme. I love customization and have added some of my favorite themes to this site. This was also the first time I stopped using Jekyll and started using zola. This generator isn't that different, but it was fast and prevented all the ruby crap by just being a single binary.

Indie Web

After creating my own theme and having more fun with my site, I started surfing the web more and more and found out about webrings and 88x31 badges/buttons. I wanted to add some to my own site, so this naturally became the next iteration of my website. This also led to the creation of /buttons I also wanted to have a place to talk about the books I've read, so a custom bookshelf was also very necessary.

I also created my own button, that others can add to their sites. I created it in Krita and learned some of its animating workflow along the way.