I will be using this page a working post for my website, I’ll mention updates and future plans with the website here.
This is the repo for the site (https://github.com/raveenapp/main-site.git)
History of This Website
Completed: October 2022
I’ve always liked the idea of having my own little piece of the internet (hence why its the tag line on home page). But I didn’t really commit to having my own website until I watched a CollegeInfoGeek video on it in 2017 (https://youtu.be/GTGP90fIXO8). Basically, the video explained that as a student or a young professional, you can make yourself standout by having your own website. You can use the website as a portfolio to show your experiences using multimedia instead of just words on a resume. So in the winter of 2017, I decided I would make my own. I acquired Raveen.ca and made my first Wordpress website. I found a theme that worked and started to make pages and posts. I wish I kept archives of my previous versions of my website but hindsight is 20/20.
Right off the bat, I saw how hard it was to customize webpages on Wordpress. I could have totally been using it wrong, but it felt like you were restricted to only the pages the theme offered and if you had a new idea for a page, implementing it was cumbersome. However, since the winter semester was starting soon, I made it work the best I could and move on.
The website stayed the same for the next 1.5 years, I would add posts or update my resume here and there but that was it. Then covid hit, I finished my co-op in May of 2020 and I had the summer to myself before the next semester started again. I decided I wanted to a stab at web development. A friend had told me about The Odin Project [] and I started to complete the lessons. I was having fun learning front end development but then I hit a roadblock when I came to JavaScript. During that time, another friend had introduced me to Elementor (https://elementor.com/). It’s a Wordpress plugin website builder where you can drag and drop modules. It still wasn’t my ideal solution, but it worked.
That was until I got frustrated with WordPress again. I remember I had a hard time making posts, and I had read (pardon the language https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) at the time so I decided to scrap everything and make just a simple HTML site. It had one list of CSS just to change the font. It also worked well, but still making posts and updates still didn’t flow as well as I wanted it to. Anytime I would make a change to the site, I would have to login to my host, go to the CPanel and swap the old version of the file with a new version. I always wanted to regularly make blog posts but there was too much friction to make it work this way, so I just left it as a portfolio site.
That was until I was talking to someone at work. I had mentioned to him that I was looking virtualization and Linux and we ended up having a long conversation about it. Then anytime he visited the office, we would chat about it further. During one of our conversations, he mentioned a framework called Hugo. It used markdown for content generation (which I had gotten very familiar with over the summer) and could be updated with Git and hosted almost anywhere. Instantly it clicked, this was what I was looking for. It had an easy flow for updating the website, enough customization to give me control and used markdown. Now the fourth version of this site is born. Eventually, I’d like to make my own theme, but Gokarna will do just fine for now :).