New personal site, who this?

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This one has been long overdue, but my personal website finally got a makeover. alexlakatos.com

It used to look like this:

old alexlakatos.com

I've set it up with Jekyll, a stock Material theme and GitHub Pages about 4 years ago. It was clunky, Material was already dated when I made it, and it was slow to build. You could say I didn't really love it, but I needed something in a pinch and it did the trick.

I've been putting off doing something with it for a while now, and the biggest mental blocker has been that I didn't want to go stock theme again. It is supposed to be an expression of myself in digital form, and I'm not exactly stock.

As luck would have it, Hui Jing was bored and offered to help me out, so I grabbed this opportunity to get to a state where I love my personal website.

Here's how it looks now:

new alexlakatos.com

Hui Jing wrote more about the process and the "Artisanal CSS" magic she's worked on it in a blog post.

I've migrated it from Jekyll & GitHub Pages to Hugo & Netlify. The main reason for looking for a change was the build time. I don't have that many pages (under 100), but the build time was in minutes. Moving to Hugo and Netlify has shaved that down considerably, to 20 seconds.

I've also added a little pun in it, in the sense that as a JavaScript person I haven't written any JavaScript for my own website, it's just HTML & CSS. ๐Ÿ˜…

I love the way my personal site looks right now, and as Hui Jing put it, I love the fact that "this is not industrial mass-produced CSS. This is customized CSS that only works well for this particular site."

And because Hui Jing was still bored, she enlisted Wei's help to give it a light mode on top of the dark mode. ๐Ÿ˜…

I'm curious about what other people are using for their websites, from the stack, and hosting all the way to the look and feel. Please leave a comment with your personal website and something you really like about it. I'm sure other people around here are looking for inspiration, it's not just me!