How this site came to be

Note: Old Post! No more using this stack!!

Over the past 2 years,I have learnt a lot (tech and more) from reading blogs of random people on the internet. Out of them, the most useful/interesting ones were those that were hosted under their own domain with a custom, unique design and was not a medium article behind a paywall or mandatory login.

I was heavily inspired by their work to make a website for myself as well. A website for showcasing my work as well as a section where I can write stuff or document my thoughts. I got this idea in mid 2021, but kept pushing back working on it since I felt lazy.

On December 31st 2021, while I was browsing the internet, I found I could get a domain for myself for ~5 USD on porkbun.com (very good site) and bought smaitra.com on a whim. Spending cash on something is a pretty good motivator. I quickly created a landing page with HTML and CSS in a day, deployed it and linked it with the domain name. It looks like this. I had left it at that, thinking I would restyle it, add features soon. Soon turned out to be weeks and then weeks turned into six months.

Considerations

I usually write notes in markdown. To put few of those files on the internet, I would have to consider the choices:

• Write each post again in HTML (tedious) and maintain an index of it.
• Use tools like pandoc and convert the markdown to HTML. A good choice, but I would have to consider both .md and .html files containing same content. Also, I would be limited to mostly static content with this choice.
• Use MDX to just write in markdown, while automating the repetitive parts and having overall more flexibility with what I want to display in each post.

I finally chose MDX and decided to use stuff I am relatively unfamiliar with, for the sake of experimenting.

• Remix : I have seen lots of praises for this framework and wanted to try it out.
• TailwindCSS : Styling with utility classes, pretty cool.
• MDX: For reasons stated above.

Just by reading the documentations and searching the web for relevant examples, I was able to create this website in few hours(most of my time was spent styling the landing page).

There are many more features that I want to add (maybe a dark mode?) and there are few things that do not work as intended that require further investigation, which I would do…someday.

At the End

Overall, as of writing this post, I am pretty satisfied with this website. I intend to keep it this way, while posting time to time, until I get another wave of motivation to rewrite everything from scratch. Thank you for reading my first blog post!