zekromaster.net

As long as it builds.

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Why this site sucks

How is this website different from all other websites?

(Tags: software-development, web-development)

"Zekromaster, why does this website suck" you tell me.

"Why aren’t you using all the thingamajigs and the funny doodads that modern web development gives us?"

And I hear you alright. We have modern CSS, and TypeScript building to JavaScript, and complex rube-goldberg machines that make writing an "Hello, World" something like this

    import library;
    import another_library;
    import database;

    database.connect(
        library.getAWSLambda("watchamacallit")
    )

    world = database.get(
        """
            SELECT WORLD
            FROM WORLDS
            WHERE USER='ME'
        """
    )

    world.push(
        another_library
        .deploy_anti_bobby_table_measures(
            0
        )
    )

    world.callPrintfAsAService(
        "Hello, %s"
    )

Yet, as you may have noticed from the syntax highlighting above, I’m actually using something developed after the Ides of March for my website.

This website is made with Hugo, using a theme I made myself called Plain

You see, I had a personal website multiple times in my life. It started as a Wordpress blog, made in one night and where I posted movie and videogame reviews. Then I started doing webdev, and the website became an horrible beast made by an high school student with too much time on their hands who built his own horrible CMS in Javascript running entirely on a directory full of .json files.

Sometime around my second year of university (I do study Software Engineering) I realized I needed to simplify my website, and moved to Hugo. This didn’t last long, though it lead me to developing another Hugo theme, Back to the 90s.

I later went back to using the "coolest" things around to make my website, and started making something with Strapi and Angular. I have been websiteless for months now, waiting to make the "perfect Angular frontend for my personal API".

And then, it hit me, right in the stomach. Why am I doing all this?. I literally only want to host a personal blog, and a list of games I want to brag about completing 100%.

I threw away all the fancy CSS, and the animations, and the GUI work I did. I don’t need all that, I need to display content, and you know what’s made to display content? Static HTML. Static, minimal, almost-css-less HTML. And it comes with the plus of being free on DigitalOcean.

Now, that isn’t to say I’m not gonna use anything "too fancy" on my website. I already have plans to add some "progressive enhancement" features, first of all a searchbar - but fancy features are not the focus of this website. The focus of this website is being a personal blog. And it’s working well as a personal blog as it is.