Setting Up a Website
(Evil) Backstory
So, I finally decided to buy myself a domain and put myself out there on the interwebs. This obviously isn’t my first presence on the internet (throwback to pre-affordable-internet days when I used to sit around scrolling on the sand as opposed to almighty machine learning overlord curated content).
Old Website
I even used to have a website before this one. Right around the time I created a GitHub, I managed to whip up a simple landing page for myself which has been available at clifordjoshy.github.io for the past three years. By the time this goes up, that site (that I’ll let you know took me a whole night to figure out the CSS for) would’ve been long buried in some Microsoft cache somewhere. As a remembrance of the website that’s been with me throughout my (villainous?) journey, I’ll leave here a screenshot.
Retrospect
I remember when I made this in my first year of college, a friend of mine asked me if I knew enough to be calling myself a “Developer”, and frankly, I’ve been wondering that ever since. At least in the present, as I sit here trying to figure out making static websites in a tool I didn’t know an hour ago, I feel a bit more confident in calling myself that.
Starting a blog
Ramblings
I’m not sure how long this post is going to be or if anyone will ever even read this, but buying myself a domain has been on my bucket list for a long time, and yesterday I bought this on an impulse. Once that was done, I had to put aside all the other work I had to do (RIP me) and had to have something to put on there immediately.
What does the future hold?
I hope to post every so often about random projects that I’m working on or just things that I do that I can’t tell anyone I know without them going “Eh?”. But if my two childhood diaries are anything to go by, this too will just be a forgotten item at the bottom of my desk drawer (please go back a quick second and see if I managed to cross five posts. Shoot me a congrats if I did, please. I’ll need it).
Why HUGO?
I wish I could say I had a long research montage which finally led to me knowing from the bottom of my soul that this was “the one”. Sadly, I cannot. The story is much more boring. I came to know about HUGO because one of my college seniors had his website on it, which I saw and thought “Huh! Websites without CSS. Neat! Guess I’ll add it to the evergrowing bookmark pile.”. five months later, I was in the market for a website and could not bother with the thought of CSS (did I mention I loathe CSS. I do not have the patience or the know-how to operate that clunk). In comes the bookmark.
I did look into Jekyll as well, but ended up going with this because of my one holy metric; Github stars.
What have I done so far?
Well, I spent a bunch of time looking for themes and finally settled on LoveIt. Can’t say I love it, but it is pretty neat.
I fiddled around with a lot of the settings and ended up overriding the posts preview in the homepage and the very page you’re seeing now. This theme feels the need to add along an author to every post. I feel like unless I really get into the concept of pseudonyms over the course of the next year, it would be kind of repetitive to see my name pop up in five different places every link you click on here. So, goodbye I bid to that. In case you are wondering who is the author of this, take a good look at the domain name and make your wildest guess.
Obviously, you can just go check my git history to get a full log of what I’m doing (I write readable commit messages, I swear), but the gist of it is that I’ve been fiddling around trying to understand all that HUGO has to offer.
What will I do?
Well, as of now, I have a ‘projects’ entry in the navbar that doesn’t really do anything. Maybe by the time you’re reading this, you’ll be able to see me flexing some of the projects I had the (mis)fortune of doing over the past few years.
Outside of the scope of this website, I do need to work on my final year project (look out for a post on NITCbase) which I will be shamelessly plugging once I feel it’s in a reasonably good state. I have a bunch of ideas on projects to do in Rust as well. Maybe someday I’ll have something to show for the two Rust stickers I carry around on my laptop every day.
Finito
I think I’ve written enough for a first blog post. The whole point of this was just to see how this looks on the website; not gonna lie. (yes, I know lorem ipsum text exists).
If I do manage to keep this going for a year, it would be really cool. It’s not like I have a shortage of things I want to talk about. On that note, good riddance!.