The old site had been sitting untouched for a while. Every time I looked at it, I felt that specific kind of guilt that comes from something you built years ago that no longer represents who you are or what you care about. So I blew it up and started over.

What Was Wrong With the Old Site

Nothing was technically broken, which is almost the problem. It just felt stale — a relic of a different era of my thinking about the web. The design was generic, the content was sparse, and the whole thing ran on a stack that I'd grown out of. Maintaining it felt like homework.

More practically: it wasn't mine in any meaningful sense. It used a theme someone else made, lived on a platform someone else controlled, and looked like a thousand other developer portfolios. I could have been anyone.

What I Wanted Instead

I wanted something that felt personal and a little weird. The web used to be full of pages like that — handmade, opinionated, idiosyncratic. Somewhere along the way, everyone's site started looking the same.

That's where the Windows 98 aesthetic came from. It's not just nostalgia (though it is a little nostalgic). It's a statement: this place is mine, I built it, and it looks exactly how I wanted it to look. If that's not your taste, that's fine — but you'll remember it.

The New Stack

The new site is built with 11ty, which is about as simple as a static site generator gets. No magic, no framework overhead, no build tooling I don't understand. Markdown goes in, HTML comes out.

Styled with 98.css for the Windows 98 look, with some custom CSS on top for layout. The whole thing runs as a static site behind nginx in a Docker container — dead simple to deploy, dead simple to update.

Why It Matters

Honestly, the best reason to have your own site is that it's yours. Social platforms come and go. Algorithms bury things. Account bans happen. A static site you control doesn't have any of those problems.

And there's something about the act of building it yourself — really building it, not dragging blocks around in a CMS — that makes you more invested in actually writing things. This post exists partly because I want to see if that's true.

We'll find out.