n1cludePosted by n1clude on 2026-08-03 17:59
Hello, world!
I have finally set this up! I’m excited to start writing.
I’ve been thinking of what the first post should be about. I decided to write about the development of this website.
First attempt
I’ve been noticing that my friends and university acquaintances had their own little websites. Mostly a simple link page, but some also had little blogs. I was inspired by them. And so I desired of creating my own website.
In 2025, I bought the domain, niclude.xyz. Nice one if you ask me. And cheap too. Then came the time to actually develop the site. The first attempt was, uhh, boring. I couldn’t decide on which framework I want to build my site on, so I chose plain HTML + CSS that time. I made the index.html, sketched some design. It was like, full monospace. With orangey hues.
I added some minimal content, namely “about me”, contacts and services the domain was hosting back then. Threw the code on GitHub Pages and called it a day.
A drastic overhaul
After a short 1 month pause, I have returned to my website development. I’ve grown to hate the old design by that time, so I wanted to redo it. Made a new design in Figma. I was inspired by the old minimalistic box arts and applied that design to my page. A contrast background for a header, the website name in Sans font. Then, a fine background photo from Tatran mountains at Štrbske pleso and an array of informational “cards” arranged vertically.
This new design also used orange color (lmao). By the way, I will publish that background photo later on my gallery. When I implement it of course.
Then I implemented it, pushed to GitHub and quickly forgot about its existence.
This revision
I then abandoned the website state for an even longer period. 3-4 months. Well, technically a shorter period – the last commit was 2 months ago. But that was about removing some info, so I wouldn’t count that as “updating the website”.
And now here’s the new website. New design, new technologies. How did it come to exist this time?
The design
I took the “you are connected to a terminal” design approach from my first attempt, and I revised it drastically. Reading the text in monospace will strain your eyes, so I opted in the nice serif document design instead. And you can also see the little prompts you “were typing out” to read the contents. The “enhanced” cat command is scanning for the document type, and parses it into a pretty document for a proper reading experience. At least that’s the idea behind this layout.
I refused to apply rounded corners to anything on this website. Rounded corners are for modern apple slop designs. Hard corners are for chads :-^)
All links have strong constrast hightlight on hover.
The tech
Previously all the attempts were written in pure HTML and CSS. This time I was exploring the alternative options to this caveman approach. Talked with ChatGPT for a bit. It suggested various options, among which was Astro. I’ve checked out what is it capable of. I heard many good things about it. So that was my choice. I liked it.
And I currently like it! It allows templates, components and stuff like that while achieving static site performance. The same features I’d previously only find in frontend frameworks like React or Vue. I had not done a full-blown research and comparison though, and Astro may not be a perfect choice for my scope. But it works, and works good for now.
I can also write my own blog now with Astro’s Markdown rendering! Mind you, I could make a blog at a first attempt period of the website, copy-pasting the HTML template for blog and slowly going insane from that. Thank you, me, for choosing Astro.
The hosting
The website code is hosted on a GitHub repo, open for everyone. The website itself is built and hosted on Render. I chose Render due to hearing good things about it in the past. I was daring to deploy something on it. And it is functioning nice, I guess. I don’t have a lot of CI/CD experience, so I can’t comment more on that.
Closing words
All in all, I’m happy with current website. For now.
Thank you for reading the post. I appreciate it. See you for more.