Crafting this site has been one of the most fun-filled experiences I've had in the past 2 years. Through this blog post, I intend to give you a glimpse of my journey making a static website.
You might have noticed that this site is hosted on Github Pages, but things were different in 2016 when I had no clue what Github was. For a noob who had no experience in [ Git, HTML, CSS, Javascript ], Wordpress came as a savior. Within two hours or so my first website was up and running. It was later the next day that I realized the speed and ease of use came at a major cost, not only was the site unintuitive but managing it was an ordeal.
It was in 2018, when I was again determined to create my site. After a brief stint with Jekyll ( which gave me the old Wordpress vibes ), I decided it was time to start experimenting. I had the following objectives in my mind:
With the above principles, I hosted the site on Github Pages but it was far from perfect. One of the most important aspects of web design is accessibility. With monospace as the default font, text inside <pre> tags, and no use of viewport property the site was inaccessible.
The following months went into creating a blog section and making the site more accessible. I also added a native dark mode and syntax highlighting for my blogs ( both in JS ). From my experience, three things have to be taken care of when using JS on the web - is the site accessible without it, does it seriously affect performance and lastly does it violate user's privacy. A lot of web developers feel that screen readers, no-JS users, and text-based browsers are not worth supporting, while I hold a contradicting opinion, I strongly believe every page should fail gracefully. A brilliant discussion discussing the pros and cons of supporting no-JS has been conducted on Stack Exchange.
My priorities for this site have drastically changed since 2019. Today I use a custom Markdown-to-HTML parser to write these blog posts. Producing quality content, making the site accessible to all devices out there and complementing all that with a clean UI are the only objectives I am aiming at.
Finally, I would like to end the blog post with a collection of web design and internet-architecture related links you might find interesting: