When I initially worked on this project, I wanted to do everything purely through HTML, CSS, and JS, without using any developer tools. This worked GREAT as an undergrad learning experience, but as one becomes an experienced developer, I started to see many issues everytime I wanted to update my website:
All scripts for page index generation were batch files (now I just use Linux / WSL)
Injecting hard-coded HTML using JS dynamically on the client side
The dynamic nature of client-side rendering caused unnecessary loading times and compute
I had utilized iframes to embed HTML files into specific positions because I wanted it to be "modular" and not re-write my sidebar, navbar, etc., every time. However, this also caused latency issues as well as scrolling issues on-load on mobile
I also hate JS, so staying outside of that was for the better. Right now, the only JS file I have is for the animation on the home page
Since then, I quickly learned about static-site generation tools and realized it would be so much easier to not only manage a website this way during a dynamic "templating" development lifecycle of the website, but I can also solve the dynamic generation and hard-coding HTML injection within the JS files. Since I am very intimately familiar with Rust, I decided to use askama to generate the HTML. This solved my issues, I did the classic "re-write in Rust", and now I can work on my website much more efficiently. Github thankfully allows for a solid amount of hosting, so I have a new repo for the website development with all my templates, and then I simply deploy to a submodule `prod`, which I proceed to push to arpadav.github.io on GitHub. I have tagged the old version for memory/historic purposes, mainly for myself: https://github.com/arpadav/arpadav.github.io/releases/tag/v1.0
(Jan 13, 2022) Overview:
I wanted to create a website which can hold my projects, notes, thoughts, and more. Essentially like an extended resume and / or blog.
I am a stickler for being minimalistic, using the least amount external modules as possible, and making generative / flexible pages.
This is why if you were to view the source of this page, all you see are iframes and embedded JS scripts. Now if you were to use the 'inspect element' tool, you can see how the site is generated. I have used 0 external modules (i.e. no jQuery, AngularJS, NodeJS, etc.) and all design aspects (like animation, style, etc.) are unique to myself and my personality. This was done to limit my dependencies and to make the whole site more lightweight. Yes, I doubt it is as optimal or as fast as if I had additional help, but this was a personal decision.
