The Chronicles of Kush.in
The domain for this website was bought by my father some time after I was born (in 2006) and created a simple website shortly after I don’t exactly remember the tech stack for obvious reasons. Later when I began to explore web development, I took over the domain and hosted some of my stuff on the subdomains. In 10th grade, I thought using React to build a math solving website would be cool, so I did. That thing probably has archaic code right now, thanks cloudflare for keeping it running.
BytePost
Unlike most of my projects that never get finished, my blog is an exceptional project that got finished not once, but several times over. I started out with Jekyll, because some jekyll theme probably landed on my github feed, and I thought it would be really cool to copy that template for a blog whose contents I was not entirely prepared for. Turns out, I wasn’t quite good at HTML and CSS at the time Although who says I am now XD. But after what seemed like a tremendous effort of borrowing someone’s code to implement a dark theme, adding an option to switch was a real achievement. More effort was made into thinking of a name for this blog than what posts to write in it.
While writing this article, I realised wayback machine didn’t archive the old blog, and I don’t happen to have access to the old code as well, so I guess an old screenshot from a chat of mine should suffice.
This was just the blog, the landing page for my website was different. By different, I mean very bad. It was a cesspool of all bad practices one could possibly implement in a website (never knew about lighthouse back then).
After a significant time of sticking with this cringe worthy page, I came to explore the YavaScript world beyond React. Fireship made me use sveltekit, and what better way of exploring a new framework than rewriting my blog. So that’s what I did.
The Website With SvelteKit
Here too, I started out with some template, but ended up making so many changes that I would barely call it a copy. I watched a couple of Hyperplexed’s videos to bloat the entire website with a ton of css and fancy animations, only to gradually remove them one by one until it was minimalistic enough for me again. This is what I ended up with. In terms of design choices, it was pretty decent. It was also fast enough, as sveltekit has SSG.
This website stuck around for quite a while, BytePost had been removed and the blog and landing page were consolidated into one website. It had an aesthetic look and decent performance. I tweaked it several times to get perfect lighthouse scores, and everything was really good and stable.
That was only until I was made aware of the harsh reality of the javascript world, I had to keep updating my code for every little breaking change sveltekit went through. A lot of the things didn’t work as expected, $ \LaTeX $ wasn’t supported. And it was just a terrible experience trying to maintain a codebase which I wanted to forget about. I spent more time on tweaking the javascript for a dead simple static site than actually writing any content.
New Goals In Mind
I came across Tufte CSS a while ago, and really wanted a blog with all those features. I wanted them so badly that for a moment I was considering to write raw HTML like Tufte CSS’s example page for every blog post. However, I had other plans too. I had been looking at a couple of hugo themes which had tufte’s features. After several months of mere planning and exploring the idea was finalized. The following were roughly my goals for making this blog:
- Negligible, or no javascript dependencies.
- All the features and aesthetics of Tufte CSS.
- Support for $ \LaTeX $
- Blazingly fast page speeds and minimalism.
I did find a suitable template which satisfied the first three requirements. However, as I began using them I had to customize a lot of minor things to get what I wanted. In the end, I got a lot more than what I had expected when starting out which is a different saga altogether. I hope to cover the details of this new blog on a different post.