New homepage
May 20, 2022 · 3 min
It seems that I always spend a lot of time on building my homepage.
My first homepage (or blog) was built with Jekyll in 2018. I wrote a theme named Gungnir for it, since I found out none of the existing Jekyll themes are good enough for me. At that time, I knew almost nothing about FE and struggled a lot with JavaScript, CSS and the Liquid templating language, leading to messy code that is difficult to maintain. In 2020, I migrated Gungnir to VuePress, a more powerful static website generator. And last year, I rewrote the theme in VuePress 2 to take advantage of Vue 3 and Vite, which is still actively maintained.
Yeah, I spent so much time developing my own blog themes that I almost forgot about writing blog posts lol.
These days, once again, I started building another homepage, which I hope will be the last one (before I get fed up with it again in about 2-3 years).
Style
I want my homepage to feel more “research-oriented” and “serious”. My old homepage looks more like a blog with a bunch of fancy images than a “researcher’s homepage”. Meanwhile, I grew tired of looking for cover images for posts and became obsessed with simple website designs.
I don’t want to modify my blog theme directly since I still love its style and it already has a certain number of users. Thus I wrote a new one.
Tech stack
Gradually, I found myself getting really into atomic CSS frameworks like Tailwind CSS, Windi CSS, and UnoCSS. I’m using UnoCSS in almost all of my recent projects, and I can say that I never want to write semantic class names and regular CSS anymore. Actually, I even considered applying UnoCSS to the VuePress blog theme Gungnir, but it sounds like a lot of work and I’m not sure if it is the right choice. But starting a new site with UnoCSS could be much easier, and that’s what I’m doing.
I built my new homepage on top of Vitesse. With the power of vite-ssg and several Vite plugins like vite-plugin-pages, vite-plugin-vue-layouts, and vite-plugin-md, a personal website with a blog section can now be built in a really short time. For me, this solution is lightweight and fast, making the development experience smooth and sweet. If you just want a simple personal website or blog and don’t care about maintaining a theme, I guess Vitesse could be a nice choice.
Anyway, this site is still WIP, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it will eventually become.