This post is just a brief walk through time, going through each iteration of my personal website here with some commentary on each, up until the current version.

Every time I go to use a static site generator or some sort of templated site generator/designer, I run into some unforeseen issue in getting it to behave in precisely the manner I want. As a result, I find myself stretching my web development legs on a semi-regular basis as I build the each site to meet my needs exactly. It's also a fun challenge to come up with a new design that solves the problems I discovered with the last one, while also trying to look decent.

Version 1

V1 of my site is lost to time sadly. I know it exists because of how my project folders are named, but no screenshots survive of it. If memory serves me right, I abandoned this attempt very quickly before moving on to v2.

Version 2

I tried to style this version to look somewhat like a what someone from the '00s-era of personal sites would do if they had more than tables and gifs for site layout. There was a homelab section of the site that I was quite proud of, having made graphics for all the different pieces of equipment that my lab was composed of at the time.

Funnily enough, in creating v4, I actually discovered a directory traversal vulnerability in v2 and how I was handling some urls in one of my components. It wasn't a particularly useful one, but a vulnerability nonetheless. I've since fixed those issues before reimplementing the feature in v4.

Version 3

In my hyper-minimalism era now. I sacrificed my blog in favor of a more prominent display of my photography, and my projects listing became a lot more minimal. On the other hand, I got to play with some libraries I hadn't used before, namely Masonry for my gallery. My homelab section carried into this iteration of my site, but having not updated it in the port, it was starting to diverge from the reality of what my homelab actually was.

At a glance, these screenshots make it seem like there were separate pages for everything, but in actuality it was minimalist to the point that it was just a single page you would scroll down.

Version 4

Where we are now.

This version aims to retain some of the simplicity of v3, while also restoring some of the practicality of v2. Sadly my homelab page did not survive the transition to v4, as by this point reality had diverged too far from it and a full redesign of the component would have been too time consuming.

My blog returns from v2 in a slightly different form, now presenting as the project log that this post is a part of. A key failing of v3 was the inability to present non-code projects or projects with private repositories that I've worked on, so v4 aims to address that that.

It's a shame that using a sans-serif typeface makes a website look like it's one of those AI-generated click farming articles that pollute search results.