Personal Website
January 15, 2023Why
To be honest, I was kind of skeptical of having a personal website. Despite having plenty of experience creating websites, and really enjoying the process of developing front-end UIs, I still didn’t have an exact reason for one. Like if I was a successful “influencer” or someone with authority in a field, I could understand having a website. Also if I wanted to increase job prospects by sharing coding projects, I get having a portfolio. But for all intents and purposes I’m just some dude, and I am not “wooing” any employers with my projects. So why? Well it boils down to three things: documentation, organization, and motivation.
I have a bit of a problem when it comes to documenting, or keeping things in general. For whatever reason, I feel that physical things take up mental space. Therefore I limit the stuff I keep (not exactly a minimalist, but more like a “Marie Kondoist”). So I hope posting on my website can help in this regard. Unlike documenting though, I think I’m fairly organized… maybe too much so. I currently have folders seperating files related to my career, personal life, and family. Within those, there are lists regarding goals/projects, and individual folders for said goals/projects (amongst other things). I felt this website was a good opportunity to aggregate my coding projects and my personal projects, putting them all in one place. Lastly I figured I could set goals for the number of projects/fragments in a month as a sort of motivator.
Design
I think I probably committed some cardinal sins of design with this one. The main reasoning behind the overall design was to utilize only necessary code (aka no JavaScript) without having it look like a 90s website. Color-wise I tried to be as simple as possible with it being legible (hence black and white), this also allowed easy dark-mode implementation (based on OS preference). I could of definitely put more personality in the website with having my favorite colors, but at this points I’m coming to terms with the fact that red is no longer my favorite. Four-years old me would call current me a heretic, but my wardrobe consisting of basically black and gray speaks for itself.
Additionally, I wanted the projects and fragments section to be extensible. I planned on regularly adding to these pages, and having to copy-paste code seemed like a bit of a pain. So I turned to static site generators (definitely did not want to be locked-down to a CMS), and I happened to already know about HUGO, and people seemed to think it’s pretty good. Using Markdown to add pages has been really nice, and making a custom theme with partial codes and templates has been extremely convenient. Maybe I’ll even post a fragment on making custom themes with HUGO. Also one last thing was I wanted to keep in mind accessibility so I used the A11y Project’s checklist to develop the site.
Future Features
Overall I’m content with the website as is, but there are some things I plan to add/change. Two smaller changes I hope to implement are layout fixes to the projects/ fragments pages, and to the individual article pages. My website layout is done using flexboxes, and they work extremely well, but for those pages I think I could optimize the elements better. Also, I plan to mess around more with fonts and website coloring to increase the site’s legibility. As for additions there is mainly one thing, and that is tagging. Tags are native with HUGO so I feel it’ll be simple to work out, but I also plan to introduce tag filtering on the projects/fragments pages with it. At the end of the day I wanted to get the ball rolling, now is as good a time as any.
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