shanew.co.uk

Project Introduction

This project is a work in progress and is the building of this website.

The goal is to migrate all of my personal notes and tools to this website from Notion and various spreadsheets/other files in OneDrive.

Eventually I would like all of my notes and general life management to be done through this website, though I expect may take quite a long time to get there. I also hope to host demos of the other projects I've done and handle any useful automation I may want (for example managing my finances)

Building the site

I decided that I didn't want to use a traditional site builder like Wordpress so I could maintain control of how the site works and only implement features I actually need. Also I thought it would be easier to avoid being locked into one hosting provider and add some extra features I don't think a normal CMS would provide, so I decided I would code it myself.

In an attempt to keep things simple, I have tried to minimise the use of Javascript. The web page itself is mostly just HTML and CSS and the HTML file is generated using Flask templates.

Page content is written largely in markdown and converted to HTML by the server when the page is loaded. This allows me to write the webpages without needing to mess about with HTML (in most cases at least - I can't avoid it when I want to add some advanced features to a page). At the moment this markdown content is stored in Github with the website code but eventually I suspect I will need to implement external storage and have the website load from that.

Future plans

At the moment I am just focusing on getting basic content in, but once I'm happy with that, here are some stretch goals: