My Website

Welcome to my website! I think I am finally happy with how it looks and feels. I took most of the CSS styling from protesilaos.com and got a very nice and simple to use color palette from uchū. I should probably add these attributions to the footer, but I have not done that yet.

The layout is responsive to changes in window size and also looks nice on phones and tablets. The info-bar very neatly switches from a sidebar to a header when the width of the window is narrow enought. I am also quite enjoying the fonts. I am using:

• Public Sans, as my sans font. Find it here.
• Inria Serif, as my serif font. Find it here.
• Fira Mono, as my mono-spaced font. Find it here.

Moreover, this website is powered by a bespoke static site generator that I have called haya. Haya uses ReStructuredText which seems to be the defacto markup language for the Python ecosystem. I like RST; it is so easy to extend with new directives. If I used Markdown I'd have to wrestle with the parser directly; it is not extensible by any means. Extensibility is a necessary feature in any markup language for me to use. I think the markup language with the best extensibility is the Scribble system used by Racket, but I was more comfortable quickly writing Python. The main RST parser/writer is the docutils package.

For HTML templating I used the mako templating engine. Mako is nice to use, because I can just embed arbitrary Python code into the template. This is much more intuitive to me instead of using insane templating DSLs. The Scribble documentation system I mentioned before is even easier and nicer to use for templating but alas it is not in Python (I could have sub-processed into Racket to compile Scribble files).

Haya has the basic features needed to make personal websites with blogs. I will keep adding features to Haya as an when I need. Feel free to contribute to Haya if you end up using it too! I need to add a hot reloading server to haya next so that I am not forced to run haya build while hosting the site on localhost on the side everytime I make a change.

I plan to add a post to the blog at the end of every month to force myself to improve my writing.