The humble beginnings

The humble beginnings

The Start

When my school assigned us the task of creating personal websites, I was excited to get started. We were given a free hosting plan from Combell with a domain name, but there was a catch - it was WordPress hosting. Although I had experience with WordPress, I quickly ran into problems. The theme I chose wasn’t customizable, and my website felt cluttered and impersonal. It wasn’t a true reflection of me.

The Fix

To solve this problem, I decided to build my website from scratch using the Astro framework. It was my first time using Astro, but I found it intuitive and easy to use. I began with the basic Astro blog template project and customized it to fit my needs. Astro’s integration with other frameworks, such as React, made it easy to create a CMS for my blog posts.

One of Astro’s standout features is its ability to use Markdown to create pages. Instead of writing articles in HTML, I used Notion to create my blog posts and exported them as Markdown files in my Astro project. This streamlined the writing process and allowed me to focus on the content itself.

The only issue I faced was that my free hosting plan came with WordPress CMS, which I couldn’t change. To solve this problem, I used the hosting provided by GitHub Pages.

The Design

To solve this problem, I decided to build my website from scratch using the Astro framework. It was my first time using Astro, but I found it intuitive and easy to use. I began with the basic Astro blog template project and customized it to fit my needs. Astro’s integration with other frameworks, such as React, made it easy to create a CMS for my blog posts.

One of Astro’s standout features is its ability to use Markdown to create pages. Instead of writing articles in HTML, I used Notion to create my blog posts and exported them as Markdown files in my Astro project. This streamlined the writing process and allowed me to focus on the content itself.

The only issue I faced was that my free hosting plan came with WordPress CMS, which I couldn’t change. To solve this problem, I bought my own hosting plan on Hostinger and migrated my site there.

Website Structure

The website is structured into three main pages:

1. Homepage - featuring a quick intro about me and the things I am currently working on.

2. About me page - providing a more in-depth look at the skills I have.

3. Blog page - featuring all my blog posts.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m really happy with how my website turned out. While it had a rough start, everything fell into place in the end.