A Brand New Website
Hello hello hello everybody!!!
The greatest sammyette is back on the blog with a fresh and tasty looking new website. Quite a few things have happened since my last blog post and I am excited to write about it all here. So let's give some background about why I have a new website.
At a certain point in time, I was aware of a little language called Gleam. It didn't particularly interest me, but I knew about it nonetheless. But on March 4th, 2024, Gleam 1.0 came out. It was a major milestone for the Gleam language. It had a mascot now, a cute star named Lucy. Here's something fascinating about Gleam: it compiles to Erlang AND Javascript, isn't that just crazy? Due to that fact, there was a web development framework written for Gleam called Lustre.
To try out this freshly 1.0 language, I decided to write an alternative frontend for the Kavita server. I had a fork of Kavita just to change the layout and looks of the website beyond a simple CSS theme, but maintaining a fork of software like Kavita was a chore beyond just making the changes. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to fold out my very own frontend web app so I can have complete control of the looks, functionality, and even performance. This was a real-use project to experiment and explore a new language I was interested in learning.
With my newfound love of the Gleam language and Lustre, I made it my task to migrate my website from Hugo to a custom SSG written in Gleam. Lustre also has an SSG library which is what I used. A month later after discovering Gleam and Lustre I started this rewrite. Unfortunately it stayed in limbo due to my laziness. The Hilbish website was rewritten and deployed in Gleam before my personal website because I wasn't exactly updating it.
It's been 2 years since then. Before I wasn't particularly a web person, but Gleam turned me into a web developer. A functional, immutable programming language that just happens to compile to JS and has a web framework did that.
But let's move to September 2025 when I made a second attempt at rewritting my website. If the only thing I wanted to do was rewrite the website and keep it exactly the same as it was, this task would be easy, but I also wanted to change the style of the website entirely, which was difficult. I had a couple inspirations but I still couldn't think of an idea for my website's looks.
Luckily, over the weekend I felt some sudden motivation to get my website updated and to get a design done. Additionally I had stumbled upon Blogatto which was an SSG framework with more functionality than Lustre's SSG. Not only was I writing a new look for my website I was actually rewriting its generator (again...)
I had a couple inspirations from various web rings and the websites on them ever since September last year, so I came up with a base design inspired by the various websites I saw and the things they featured. This is why I now have "web buttons" that are 88x31 on the Home page. The very first button there is my own, which you can use to link to my website if you'd like. Please hot-link it because I am not done with the look of it. These 88x31 web buttons are really nice and they definitely look like something from the older internet. I wanted to embrace something like that on my website while having a more modern look, with various web fonts. DM Serif is a font I love utilizing ever since I discovered it. Varying typefaces really gives a plus to overall looks.
Now you're looking at the finished product. Hope you like it, because I love it. My personal website now really represents me. While the old design did at the point I made it, it grew outdated and out of touch with my own style. Stay tuned for more blogs as well because I have quite a bit to write about.