I wanted a corner of the internet that felt like mine

I guess every blog needs a first post, so here it is.

I’ve had versions of a personal site before, but they mostly felt like a profile with extra steps: name, bio, project links, done. This time I wanted somewhere I could keep changing without asking whether every section looked professional enough.

That is how this site ended up with a live Discord status, game covers, an unnecessary number of 88×31 buttons, and a music card that has already caused more bugs than it deserves.

Cover photo by Yuheng Ouyang on Unsplash.

Why not just use a profile?

I do use social apps. They’re convenient, and obviously I’m not going to convince all my friends to read an RSS feed. But every profile gets pushed into the same shape. Your post is there until the feed buries it, and your page changes whenever the platform feels like redesigning it.

Here I can make something pointless because I like it. A page can be two paragraphs. A button can blink. An old project can stay up even if the code is embarrassing now. Nobody is ranking any of it.

Also, having my own URL is just cool.

The tiny fixes took the longest

The first version worked pretty quickly. Then I started noticing things.

The sidebar moved when I scrolled, so I fixed it. The page could scroll past the actual content, so I fixed that too. My games section showed seven covers before the Show More button. Seven was technically fine, but it looked wrong every time I opened the page. Now it shows eight.

I spent way too long on the Discord status icons. Idle needed a moon that actually looked like a moon. Do Not Disturb needed the little minus sign. Online had to be green, not that weird yellow-green it was using before.

The music card was worse. It could show what I was listening to, but when I stopped it sometimes jumped back to an older track. That made the whole “live” part feel fake, so I kept poking it until stopping playback really meant stopped.

None of these fixes are important on their own. Together they are most of the reason the site feels like mine.

Photo by Alexander Nrjwolf on Unsplash.

It’s mostly just files

The site is built with Zola. Posts are Markdown files and images sit next to them. Zola turns that into static HTML, plus the feeds, tags, sitemap, and other boring things I would forget to update by hand.

I like being able to open the folder and understand where everything is. There’s no dashboard and no database needed for a blog post. I write the file, build the site, and push it.

The live parts use JavaScript, but the site does not need to become a giant app just to show my Discord status or move some badges across the screen.

What I’ll put here

Probably project notes, Linux problems I caused myself, games, Hack Club Nagpur, and whatever else I feel like writing about. I’m not promising a posting schedule because I know exactly how that would go.

I also want to stream eventually. Not coding streams or productivity stuff, just games and hanging out with chat. I don’t have a channel ready yet, so that can be a problem for future me.

For now the site exists, the first post exists, and I’ll definitely find another tiny thing to change five minutes after publishing this.

Hello, internet. :)

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