This website

After squatting on this domain for 7 years, I finally stopped procrastinating and decided to create a website. Here is everything I used to turn my visions into reality.

Structure

This website was created using the Jekyll static site generator, which runs on the Liquid template engine. Jekyll supports writing posts in Markdown, which makes writing simple pages like this one much easier. On the other hand, using plain markdown makes embedding videos and icons much more difficult.

Theme

Every page is running a custom theme built with the Bootstrap CSS library, and styled wit SASS. Jekyll automatically renders markdown files to fit the site theme.

Typescript

When it comes to creating websites, I try to keep scripting down to a minimum to improve client performance. On this site, there are currently only three times Javascript is used on this site.

• Lazy loading Stylesheets (Used for loading FontAwesome icons in the background)
• Gradient rotator (Only on index.html)
• “Get Email Address” button in contact.html (Decodes an obfuscated version of my email address to prevent scraping)

I chose to work with TypeScript over JavaScript since I prefer to use static-typing whenever possible to avoid confusion and to allow better static analysis and linting. On the other hand, Jekyll only has built-in support for CoffeeScript, so compiling to JavaScript has to be done manually.

Hosting

Jekyll produces static HTML and CSS files, meaning that they can be hosted anywhere. I chose to host this website using the Apache webserver because it’s reliable and has better documentation than NGINX.

DOOM Easter Egg

You might have noticed the spaghetti monster on the social media panel on the front page. I had no idea what to put there, so I linked to a page with a built-in x86 emulator (v86), that runs a super lightweight Linux image built with Buildroot that boots straight into the original DOOM via Chocolate Doom. Feel free to check out the buildroot configuration