A Fresh Personal Website

This is it! Version 3 of my personal website. Like many people, I keep it online as a ritual in having my own part of the web. While the old internet feels like it has died several times over, this is still my plot of it that I want to tend to.

The First Two Versions

I first built my website in React, immediately ported that over to Next.js so I could deploy it on netlify for free I just wanted to get something online and it was a great learning experience. Before that I had only ever ported existing websites between frames and done a bit of backend work. I kept the next.js version around for several years until I felt the call to update the website and learn something new.

I ended up building an entirely new website with Astro.. I enjoyed the markdown integration as I was already so used to writing documentation in markdown for work. It let me get away from Javascript and live mostly learn some the basic CSS I had been avoiding learning for many years.

Hello Zola

History repeated itself and I let the Astro site sit for a few years. I went to go update it and found the process of trying to update Astro versions exhausting. On top of that, the Shai Hulud worm had just ravaged the Node ecosystem and was popping back up in packages seemingly every few weeks. Since this website is something I want to be able to drop and pick up as it suites me, I wanted to as far from that npm install world as I could be.

I wanted something entirely divorced from the giant dependency chains found in the Javascript ecosystem. It’s not a world I know well enough or interact with enough to stay on top of best security practices and it seemed like a good idea to just avoid it entirely.

I started searching through static site generators and was drawn to Zola. It let me still use markdown like Astro. It was a single binary, no chain of node dependencies where one upstream package might get infested. Setup was insanely easy. Messing with templates was super easy. Porting over the website I had styled in Astro relatively painless (it helps that I had very little content).

What Now?

I don’t know how much I’ll update the website. What I’m happy about is that this iteration seems the most solid and I understand it the most. Ultimately I want to make sure the technology I make in my spare time is stuff that feels like something I made.

• dev