Look, A Website!

After several false starts and a lot of procrastination, I finally made myself a website.

Making a personal website has something on my (long) list of to-dos for a while now. I figured it would be a nice place to showcase various pieces of work I’ve done/might do, occassionally write things, and share some photos that I take on my adventures. It would also be a great way to learn some new skills along the way.

Choosing a technology to write this website with was a mission and a half in its own right. Initially I was enthralled with the idea of learning React and using that to build a website. Then I learned about static site generators and stumbled upon Gatsby, which also turned out to be a short-lived adventure. Looking back on it, I was having to learn too many things at the same time and couldn’t visualise how the whole solution would work for me.

In addition, I couldn’t quite find the right theme that did everything I was looking for (a mix between photo gallery, blog, and project showcase). There were elements of different templates that did what I wanted, but no one perfect fit. I eventually found two different HTML templates that I liked the look of, and decided I would just build a website using some amalgamtion of the two templates. This too did not last long, as I found the process of compiling templates with entirely different CSS structures and ways of organising elements tedious and unnecessarily complicated.

It wasn’t recently that I decided to pick up this endeavour again, after searching for a side project to do. A friend recommended Hugo as a static site generator. So I started by looking for a theme that I liked, with those same goals or criteria in mind, but again came up a bit short on the right match between function and aesthetic. It was clear that in order to get the end result I was after I would need to do some work in modifying a pre-existing theme.

However, this time I was ready for the challenge. By this time, I’d had some exposure to using templating languages with Flask and Django, as well as feeling a lot more confident (or dangerous) with Javascript and HTML, so the idea of editing layouts wasn’t as daunting anymore. I was also lucky enough to find some great examples of photo gallery implementations, so half the work was already done for me.

As I built one thing, other ideas popped into my head, and before long the many walls that seemed to stand between me and my own personal website fell away. So now, here we are: my own personal website, statically generated by Hugo, using a design based on the PaperMod theme with some significant customisations to suit my needs and liking. It’s still very much a work in progress, but at least that’s better than nothing.