22 April 2022
I have built and rebuilt this website thrice since I first started it in 2019.
Initially, it was a simple WordPress
website that I hosted on HostGator,
but soon I found that there are several online services that would host a static website for free.
At that point, I decided to make the move to a static website and started looking for tools
that would allow me to build one with the least amount of friction.
I looked at Hugo,
Jekyll and
Gatsby. I found Gatsby to be the easiest to work
with, so I grabbed a starter blog
theme and got to work. I only had to modify a few things and I was ready to publish.
I created an account on Netlify and set
it up to build and deploy my new website.
I went from no knowledge of Gatsby to deployment within the span of a weekend.
Then I did not look at the codebase for a very long time.
When I updated Gatsby on one unfortunate day, I ended up breaking it. The build started
failing on Netlify, but worked fine on my machine. Since I did not want to invest a lot of
time in debugging this, I ended up abandoning the thought of updating it for some time.
Then one day I thought, "What is the best way to make a very resilient website?"
The answer is pretty simple - a website that doesn't use anything that I do not completely
understand.
Hence, I set out to build a website in just HTML and CSS. Currently, I do not import any third
party plugins, nor have I written a single line of JS. I only use one external asset - Google Fonts,
because I think Roboto is neat.
Like everything in life, this has its pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
Just like my previous attempt with Gatsby, I built this within a weekend.
I really enjoy visiting websites with simple aesthetic, and I'm trying to emulate that here.
In the future, I may implement a system to generate HTML from markdown, but that would be
awfully close to static site generators. The only difference this time would be that I'm the
one building it and hence only I may decide to change how it behaves.