My new website

Welcome to my new website, this is it. It's a beautiful, dark moded, minimalistic mess, and it's mine. This static site will hopefully fill up over the next few years with the wonderful accounts of my existence.

I needed a new website, to replace my old website,[1] for a few different reasons:

  • My old wesbite used WordPress,[2] which is boring, and the fact that I used WordPress was a crutch I relied on which prevented me really exploring developing a website for myself.
  • My old website used cPanel,[3] which, whilst fine for basic stuff, lacks the allure and fun of using Amazon Website Services, which this one is hosted on. Plus, no job requirements list has ever put "experience with cPanel required".
  • The EU kicked me out of using a .eu domain. Yikes. I was emailed by my UK hosting provider on August 30th, 2018, that I would be losing the domain name in the event of a no deal Brexit on March 30th 2019, or, with a deal, on January 1st 2021.

I explored a lot of options for design of my personal website - there's a lot of fantastic techy blogs out there to draw inspiration from. My favourites might be this one, this one, and this wonderfully simplistic one. This were all just stumbled into on HackerNews one day. I took the best ideas from all of them and put my own flair into them to create this place.

Currently, the site is written manually with Visual Studio, version controlled with a private Git repository on GitHub, prepared for upload using gulp, then synced with AWS via command line. All written with elbow grease except the svg logos used for the header icons which were taken from iconmonstr.com.

Footnotes

  1. swilliams.eu. My old website, now taken offline. I wonder if anyone else will eventually take the domain.
  2. WordPress. Yuk, don't use WordPress. Not only does it have the problems I pointed out here, but it's incredibly insecure - literally just google "WordPress Vulnerabilities" and you'll see endless lists of problems with WordPress itself and its plugins.
  3. cPanel, in my experience, is a simplified hosting platform designed more for non-technical people.
  4. AWS, in my experience, is an endless complicated maze to get lost in.