After a weekend sprint fuelled by 90’s movies, we’ve got a v1.0.0 release of a personal website that doesn’t look like total garbage. đź¤
A screenshot of the home page of mikie.zip v1.0.0
Previous Iterations
Imagine being one of those developers who builds themselves a personal website only to completely abandon it almost immediately after its inception. 👀
Couldn’t be me. No, that’s literally me. Truth be told, I’ve performed this whole song and dance a total of 3 times in the last 3 years.
I wasn’t lying when I said I had commitment issues.
2022
My first attempt at making a personal website, circa 2022.
So by 2022, I’d had some experience with static site generators like Gatsby, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Eleventy through a project at work that I decided that I really needed my own little weird corner of the internet. I had big plans, full of moxie, with stars in my eyes.
Then life got in the way, I got busy with other side projects, yadda yadda yadda…
2023
My second attempt at making a personal website, circa 2023.
New year, new site?
As much as I had enjoyed working with Eleventy for a few months, Astro quickly became my favourite framework to build with.
I loved how Astro felt like it was upholding core web principles while still feeling like the cutting edge of web development. You got all of the static-site benefits, with none of the Nunjucks templates.
So I decided to rewrite a new site from the ground up, even sprinkled in some integration with Sanity to drive the backend. And then… 🦗🦗
2024
My third attempt at making a personal website, circa 2024.
Driven by the death of Twitter, and some influential developers rolling their own microblogs using a familiar UI, I made a new repo to try a different approach in the same vein.
Astro remained my core framework of choice (still is), with Decap CMS running a git-based backend, where I could automagically pull in my latest Letterboxd reviews and share any shitposts, photos, links, YouTube videos, or Spotify songs that caught my attention.
You’ll literally never guess what happened next.
Now What?
So it’s 2025, and for the fourth year in a row, I have a new personal website, in roughly the same state of completion as all the others. I’m still using Astro, but I’ve switched using Obsidian to draft my blog posts, and I’m dabbling with Pages CMS to see if I like their approach to git-based content management.
As Jonathan “Cage” Carlton one said, “this is where you fall down.” But I’m thinking this time will be different, if only because it would be embarrassing as hell to publish a post like this and then not finish at least a few of the following things…
// TO-DOs
In no particular order:
- 404, Tags, About, and Resources pages
- Menu toggle
- Theme toggle
- Search functionality
- Pagination
- Letterboxd & Goodreads reviews feeds
- Last.fm & Trak.tv activity feeds
- Dynamic quotes for the footer
- Table of Contents for posts template
- Syntax highlighting
- Custom markdown blocks
- Image gallery
- View Transitions
- RSS
- Assorted Easter Eggs 🤫
The whole point of this is to have some fun with it. I’ve had no shortage of dumb ideas that would give me an opportunity to learn new stuff, and what better place to do that than my own website?
But if this is the last post I make on this website, there’s always next year, right?
I heard you get the fifth one for free.