After owning this domain for about two years and not using it for anything, this week i finally decided to set up a personal webpage.

Used Technologies

This website is built using plain HTML+CSS and currently does not use JavaScript. It is completely static and simply served from a folder using nginx. Keeping it simple like this makes it quite robust as it does not depend on any external tools that I have to keep updated besides the webserver. Also, it loads fast as hell.

The Page Generator

Because I would like to have consistent UI across different pages and I am not masochistic enough to manually create and maintain a folder with a bunch of HTML files myself, I needed to use some kind of software to manage and generate the pages. Many such "static page generators" exist, so I chose to use none of them and instead write my own.

What I ended up with is a 200 line, barely commented Python script that turns a folder with Jinja templates, HTML and markdown files into this website. I wrote it in less than two days and while it might not have as many features as a "real" static page generator it currently works well for my usage case and i mostly understand how it works.

I think a personal website is one of the few places where such an approach is acceptable. Sometimes it is more fun to write something yourself rather than taking the time to understand how to use someone else's solution. Also, when it comes to styling a website, writing your own HTML and CSS rather than using a frontend library adds a personal flair to the look of your website which is something that is all the harder to find as the web turns more and more corporate and standardised.