id: tw title: This Website previous: lt next: srw date: 2021-07-05 ---

## This Website

For the last little while I have been working on making this rebuild of my website and it is finally at the point where everything works and it can replace my WordPress one.

I am not going to say that it is finished because it certainly isn't, I don't know if it will ever be. I think it is going to keep evolving as my knowledge of website design increases and I discover more of my personal style. In its current state it has all the information of the previous one.

Visually I know that this is a downgrade. Currently it is mostly plain text and images with very little styling, but I love it. It is something that I have created myself from scratch and this has a couple distinct advantages to me.

- I know it inside and out. This means that I can have it do anything I want and have the highest level of control over it possible. If something is not working correctly I can fix it.
- It is independent. With no libraries or outside generators being used if support for something stops it won't affect me. Putting in the extra work now to program it from the ground up means that it won't ever need to be rebuilt because something is no longer supported.
- It is simple. This is not the same as easy. When I first made my WordPress site at the beginning of this year it took me all of a few hours to get it up and running. Not counting moving all the articles over and formatting them this one took weeks. I did not track the time it took, nor did I work a consistent amount of time each day. This counts learning all the html, css, javascript and php. It also includes learning how to set up my own local lamp stach web server at home to test it and make sure everything was working before uploading.
- It is fast. Being written with no extra complexity and with each page being a raw php file means that there is minimal information being sent and minimal extra computation before the page is ready. This makes the site feel much more responsive and is something that I personally appreciate.
- It is mine. It is hard to describe how differently I feel about this website compared to the previous one. The previous one felt like something I curated and took care of, but there was little emotional investment in the site itself. It worked an looked decent so I was not really interested in tweaking or improving it because of that feeling of distance. Now my mind is swimming with all sorts of ideas of things to try, what sort of look I want to end up with, and all sorts of other stuff. I want to iterate on this and improve it.

The whole process has taught me a lot and having even a basic knowledge in these skills is very freeing. I now know how to make what I want web wise and get it up there. I think that personal websites are becoming more and more necessary these days for a few different reasons. Job searching is a big one. Being able to show your work is more important than ever and a personal website lets you share what you do completely on your own terms. The other one is having a space online that is yours. With more and more of our online interactions taking place through some companies portal it is easy to forget how much the interface can influence how we interact. There is also the whole issue of privace when your entire online presence is at the behest of a few companies.

I want to take a minute to talk about the simplicity point that I made earlier. I listened to a really interesting talk on simplicity. It is programming focussed so might be a little hard to follow, but I think that the main points apply to anything. The more complicated someting is the more points of failure there are. Ther harder it is to change, and the more unforseen problems we run into.

It is important to take the time to ensure that the things that we create are as simple as possible while still doing everything they need to do. It often makes them harder to make in the first place but the extra investment of time and energy upfront make maintaining and modifying them much simpler. Overall it saves much more time then it takes, but the time saved is spread out over years and is less noticeable. Kind of like good habits where the cost is now and the rewards are later.

I am very happy with it so far and look forward to continually working on it and learning more about web design. I am going to be helping my parents with their business website in the near future which is a great application for everything I am learning here.

Thanks for reading