The Chronicles of Kush.in

Kush Patel

2024-07-06

4 min read 
Table of Contents

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 (1)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 (2)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 bytepost, my old blog. Hey, don’t make fun of me this was 2021 and I was 15 Image

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, 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:

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.