This Website

2026-02-07

As corny as it sounds, I want this website to be my piece of the internet. I gave up some of my internet anonymity years ago, and that’s okay. I preserve what I can, but I’m also okay sharing parts of me. This site is my way of doing that without having to give my data to one of the big tech giants. I recognize there’s irony in hosting the site through GitHub and Cloudflare, but I have to pick my battles. I will try to move away from those eventually. I want this to be the place I feel comfortable posting what I want, what I’ve been watching or making, or whats on my mind!

This is the repo for the site (https://github.com/raveenapp/raveen.ca.git)

History of This Website

I’ve always liked the idea of having my own little piece of the internet. I would play around with crude HTML and CSS as a kid, but I didn’t really commit to pushing a site onto the internet until I watched a CollegeInfoGeek video on it in 2017 (https://youtu.be/GTGP90fIXO8). TLDW, he explained that as a student or a young professional, you can make yourself stand out by having your own website. You can use the website as a portfolio to show your experiences using multimedia instead of just words on a resume. So in the winter of 2017, I decided I would make my own. I bought Raveen.ca and made my first WordPress website. I found a theme that worked and started to make pages and posts. I wish I kept archives of my previous versions of my website but hindsight is 20/20.

Right off the bat, I saw how hard it was to customize webpages on WordPress. I could have totally been using it wrong, but it felt like you were restricted to only the pages the theme offered, and if you had a new idea for a page, implementing it was cumbersome. However, since the winter semester was starting soon, I made it work the best I could and moved on.

The website stayed the same for the next 1.5 years. I would add posts or update my resume here and there, but that was it. Then COVID hit, I finished my co-op in May of 2020, and I had the summer to myself before the next semester started. I decided I wanted to give a stab at web development. A friend had told me about The Odin Project (https://www.theodinproject.com/), and I started to complete the lessons. I was having fun learning front-end development, but then I hit a roadblock when I came to JavaScript. During that time, another friend had introduced me to Elementor (https://elementor.com/). It’s a WordPress plugin website builder where you can drag and drop modules. It still wasn’t my ideal solution, but it worked.

That was until I got frustrated with WordPress again. I remember I had a hard time making posts, and I had read (pardon the language https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) at the time, so I decided to scrap everything and make just a simple HTML site. It had one CSS property to change the font. It also worked well, but making posts and updates still didn’t flow as well as I wanted them to. Anytime I would make a change to the site, I would have to log in to my host, go to the CPanel and swap the old version of the file with a new version. I always wanted to regularly make blog posts, but there was too much friction to make it work this way, so I just left it as a portfolio site.

That was until I was talking to someone at work. I had mentioned to him that I was looking into virtualization and Linux, and we ended up having a long conversation about it. Then anytime he visited the office, we would chat about it further. During one of our conversations, he mentioned a framework called Hugo. It used markdown for content generation (which I had gotten very familiar with over the summer) and could be updated with Git and hosted almost anywhere. Instantly, it clicked, this was what I was looking for. It had an easy flow for updating the website, enough customization to give me control and used markdown. Now the fourth version of this site is born. I used a theme called Gokarna (https://github.com/gokarna-theme/gokarna-hugo), and it worked well!

Eventually, I grew tired of the theme, and browsing the Hugo themes, I found the smol theme (github.com/colorchestra/smol). It had more of a “retro” vibe that I liked a lot. I forked it and made some changes to the style and used that for a while!

From there, I started to get more familiar with the “small web” and the “indie web”. I would check out other people’s sites, and I enjoyed seeing their creativity through their sites; I wanted my site to be the same. That’s what the current iteration is, my attempt at making a site that’s mine! Of course, I had help, PetraPixel’s layout generator, other people’s code, but that’s okay, it’s okay to have help when making things.