Recreating my personal website

27 Jun 2022
#tech

I was in college when i came across Hugo, and that lead me to create my very first website, a very simple personal website, deployed using Github Pages.

It did have a blog page, and i remember writing an article about something very technical to start with. The article turned out to be decent, but the entire process of researching stuff, editing sentences and tweaking the overall feel of the write-up simply exhausted me. I wondered. How do people write such well articulated, elegant articles that too in a relatively short span of time ?

Unfortunately i didn't keep up writing, atleast on my personal website. However down the line i picked up journalling, first physical and then digital. I started writing a lot of stuff that are still mostly confined to my digital journal book. Now this exercise subtly transformed my existing internal notion on writing. Over time the exhaustion faded away. Writing became joyful.

Slowly i was able to extract pleasure from writing. Then came the level up in articulation. This was a game changer. Words inside my head began to structure themselves beautifully. The amount of clarity when they came out either as speech or text was akin to jigsaw pieces arranging themselves into place.

This is not to say that i have become a superb writer, that would be very foolish to say. I'm still pretty much half-decent at it. Though what i have acquired is, apprehension free writing. So as to say, the ghosts of (writing) past no longer haunt me.

At this point (its been more than a couple of years), i revisited my personal website, and boy did it look ancient. It was time to reboot that blog. I decided to recreate the website. Perhaps by being more hands-on, and building from the ground-up.

My search for the most suitable framework that i could build my next-gen personal website with stopped at NuxtJS (A new version was around the corner, and i had a fair amount of experience with VueJS by this time). The digital journal entries have been in the Markdown (.md) format. When i found there was a markdown based extension for NuxtJS - The NuxtJS Content Module - I could see the stars aligning in front of me. Pairing that with UnoCSS and using Cloudflare Pages to deploy the whole thing sealed the deal.

And that my friend, is the story of how i neglected my personal website for years. And how i recreated it.

Hopefully, may i stay on course with the blog. 😬