I decided, after over a decade, I should probably have a website with just slightly more substance than my previous.

Previous Website

Perhaps this is a good time to also take a little stroll down memory lane and look at some of the previous iterations of my personal website.

2009 ("somone77.is-a-geek.net")

Runescape, Garry's Mod, Teamspeak, SVN, and PHP. I miss when life was simple.

The site existed before I figured out how to buy a domain. A free DNS provider had "is-a-geek.net" and would delegate subdomains.

I hosted the website, originally, on a spare computer running Windows Server 2000 with IIS. Added PHP for some fancy dynamic content. I also had a "files" folder which had a PHP index script, allowing browsing, download, and upload. THe upload feature was unauthenticated and open to the Internet. I got some interesting uploads. Thankfully nothing concerning until my brain developed enough to realize this was incredibly stupid.

From there, my website turned into just a folder of gif images. A different one would be displayed on each page load. This was cute.

Today

This website now runs on Cloudflare Pages. Static content generated by the SSG Zola with a customized theme based on Apollo.

I wanted something I could maintain easily, had few dependencies, and that looked presentable. I hope I've arrived at something that fits the bill.

Also evaluated Eleventy and Astro, but the simplicity of Zola won me over. It allowed me to get started with, essentially, zero up front work. It's possible both other options have a lot more functionality for more complex sites, but for this, I'm happy with my decision.

It's far from done, as of writing. I'm sure it'll look different as I go. Perhaps, in another 10 years, I'll have another iteration to write about.