Kishore Vancheeshwaran
Day 0 - 100 Days to Offload

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.

If you would like to leave a comment, contact me via email.
Post 0/99 - part of 100DaystoOffload