I have always wanted to have a personal website and write a blog. I remember vaguely starting out with blogger around 2006, but that was a time when I didn’t understand computers or the internet that much so that stopped abruptly. I started blogging on wordpress in 2014 and at the time I didn’t find any topics to write about. In 2018 I discovered Blogdown when I was using RStudio. I found it pretty cool at the time. I even wrote a tutorial how to set up a blog using blogdown. Since I didn’t have any backups set up and I wasn’t aware of git at the time, I lost the 2 posts I did start out with.

After that, the main challenge I faced was the need for RStudio and R for using Blogdown. These two softwares were a bloat when I am not using it for anything other than blogging. That is when I was introduced to static site generators and Hugo. I realised I have a lesser dependency now to generate my website. The experience of writing in plain markdown was exciting. In late 2018, I got myself a domain at RBind which I thought was pretty cool. Around mid 2019, I ended up buying my own domain name from NameSilo. After that I have been experimenting with so many themes from Hugo’s themes gallery. I spent more time on modifying my themes than writing content. Every time I ask my then-girlfriend, now wife to see my theme and modification I made to make it look pretty, she’d be like this.

With that out of the way, I ended up redoing my site’s design in the past 2 days. The site is based off the theme Blank and inspired slightly by YiHui’s XMin and Dan Luu’s website. My main motivation is to have a minimal design and focus on content as much as possible. Another reason for going minimalistic was to avoid bloating my site with js or any other heavy js/css frameworks which I might not need. I have also incorporated Vanilla CSS into my css stylesheet. This was really easy and straightforward to setup and modify according to my site and needs.

When I accomplished this, I came across the 512KB club through which I found Kev’s 100 Days to Offload. I have a lot of drafts pending, at the same time I feel I can and should push myself to write more. The only expectation from the challenge is to Just Write. I will accept this challenge and hope that my writing improves over time and I am able to produce quality content for the community in the long term.

In the spirit of computer science, I’m starting this off with day 0.