First Post!

Updated: 31 Dec 2024

Here’s the first post of my remade website!

It’s finally here! After two (almost three) years of amateur website building, I’ve finally arrived to my initial goal: a website I’ve made completley on my own, using tools appropriate for the current state of the web. (This means using more than just barebones HTML/CSS, Y2K isn’t in anymore.) And, I’ve learned so much in the process of accomplishing that!

The story behind this site:

Previously, I had published a website using Github pages, Jekyll, and the YAT theme. It was good to have a temporary way of connecting my computer science activities, but even though I set up the website and wrote posts, it didn’t really feel like it was my work. So, after that site was well-established, I decided to make one from scratch. It took three separate attempts, but a year later, I finally have a site I can call my own!

Initially, I made this site using only HTML/CSS and a little Javascript for the navbar. It was first published in May of 2024, and has seen many changes since. And now, I’ve finally migrated it to Astro!

Astro as a newbie:

I’ve programmed for a good amount of years, but I never really dipped my toes into web frameworks until now! I did research for months until I came across astro, courtesy of Isak Solheim on Youtube.

So what do I think of it? It’s been a lot easier to understand than other tools I tried to use, even Jekyll themes!

Check out my old website!

Thoughts about my previous website:

It took a good amount of effort to learn how to use Ruby gems to import the YAT theme, figure out how Github Pages works (I was really new to github back then), and familiarize myself with the mountain of css, javascript, and html the theme came with. The multiple config files, backed with relatively little documentation, definitely took me in more circles than I had hoped for, but I learned a lot through trial and error. Learning through experimentation is pretty fun, after all.

Future ideas for the site:

Some smaller goals are listed on the home page, but in the future there are more elaborate additions I want to make: