My corner of the internet Link to heading

I bought this domain back in September when I went back to college. I had to host my project on the web, so when I was thinking about what to put up here, I decided it might be a good place to share my notes and learning experiences with others. I do a lot of tinkering with various things and I find writing stuff down helps me to focus and learn. Also, it gives me more of an incentive to write publicly, so that others can maybe benefit from what I have to say. If I was just writing for my own sake, I’d feel less motivated. I would also love to have comments enabled for these posts; I’m sure I can find a solution eventually.1

How I did it Link to heading

Building a website using bare HTML/CSS/JS can get very messy quickly, so I started doing some research. I saw a few static site generators, but Hugo looked like a great option.2 It allows you to build the webpages using mostly Markdown, which makes the code very clean and readable. In fact, there are note-taking applications like Obsidian that work with Markdown files because they are very intuitive and easy to manage. So, in the future, I am keeping the option open to build a digital garden in Obsidian and publish it on this site.

Now with the planning done, I simply picked a theme in Hugo and started putting together my website. I made two custom elements using HTML and JavaScript, namely the contact page and some particle effects on the home page. The contact page wasn’t too bad. I just had to create the GitHub Secrets variable, fix up the deployment, and add some JavaScript interactivity and CSS. The rest is handled by Web3Forms;3 it emails me with a notification whenever the form is filled out. As for the homepage particles, since it’s Christmas, I added some nice snow effects using Particles.js

What’s next? Link to heading

I intend on using obsidian and writing more notes, then once I have more stuff to write here, i’ll do that. I’ll also try to find a way to enable comments on these posts. Finally, I should add more interactivity and fun web stuff for the homepage. I only have the christmas snow effect so far. Maybe i’ll add a little game and my digital garden on another page. Let’s see how it goes.

  1. A common solution for adding comments to static sites is using services like utteranc.es (GitHub issue-based) or Hyvor Talk. ↩︎

  2. Hugo is a popular static site generator. You can learn more at gohugo.io. Obsidian is a note-taking app that uses Markdown files; see obsidian.md. ↩︎

  3. Web3Forms is a free form endpoint service. find it at web3forms.com ↩︎