About This Site

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to this website and asked if I had known anything about it (if you're about to open that site, do prepare yourself for the amount profanity you're about to see). That was the first time I saw the site. Although, this practice of deliberately designing websites to be bare-boned is not unfamiliar to me. And because years of spending time on Hacker News have truly lowered my UI taste^[1], I actually love the design—or lack thereof—that goes into sites like the one mentioned above. Even without HN's influence^[2], though, I feel like I'd still take that "abomination of a site" (not my words) over the average modern site; which, in my opinion, take things way over the top. And over the years, they just get worse. In the age of ever-increasing drop shadows, padding sizes, and border radii (and not to mention their century-long loading time), barren-looking sites are starting to look more welcoming for me—and I'm not alone in having this opinion.

I've been thinking of making an actual personal website for years now. And with those views, I knew I wanted a site that:

1. is designed in the most minimal way possible but without being so ugly it burns retina of whoever had the misfortune of visiting it;
2. loads fast, with a small distribution directory size;
3. will function perfectly well without JavaScript in the client machine;
4. will look the same in every screen; and
5. will last pretty much forever without maintenance.

I've had experience building sites using React before, and with server components, it is possible to make them run in the client machine without JavaScript. But they tend to be slower to load—and with my use case, a personal website, I didn't think that the developer experience it offers is worth the trade-off. Oh, and since I'm planning to host a blog, I wanted a way to write my posts in markdown and have it served to their readers as a regular old HTML file. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to have some JS library render the posts every time the user loads them. (It's a waste of resource for a personal blog that only occasionally posts something new, and the fact is, having a client-side JS violates point number three.) So the rendering has to happen during build time.

I decided to host the site with Cloudflare Pages to make life a lot easier^[3]. And the fact that it supports npm in the build process means that I can use markdown-it to render my blog posts. The back-end capability, although not used during the time I'm writing this, is a good addition if I ever want to extend this site in the future. (I also like the fact that I can still avoid using JS in the client-side code with Cloudflare Pages' back-end system.) Without JS, I did have to resort to using the "Checkbox Hack" for this site's navbar (you'll see it when the screen is smaller than 600px in width). But, so far, I've found it refreshing to write most of this site in just HTML and CSS.

You can view the source code for this site here.

(I don't really have much point in writing this post. I mostly just wanted to try out the blog's markdown rendering.)