I first made this website in 2016. I took it down in 2018. I am now bringing it back up in 2024. I am at a new point of life and can focus on my personal brand again. I simply need a blog to start with. This one works. See https://aqeelakber.com.

I wrote this website for mobile first with a KISS philosophy from scratch. I wanted to see how beautiful of a reading experience I can create for the reader with nothing but the basics.

You will find the code for this website is very basic indeed. Just standard HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This was my challenge. A reduced pallete. I try to fit as much goodness and joy out of it as possible.

I have put little to no effort into optimising it for performance. I wanted the reader to be able to right click, view source, and be able to understand what I did if they wanted. Teaching / Sharing / Learning are part of what I want this website to instill. Because it is so basic, and honestly it’s my personal blog so I don’t get much traffic, I’m not concerned about the performance hit of serving comments in my code to the user.

Visual design inspired by minimalism, scientific journal articles, and originally by https://colah.github.io

The user experience is designed for comfortable reading like a book and app like familiarity.

1. Making your own blog and contributing

Feel free to fork, you will want to delete everything in [BROKEN LINK: _posts] and [BROKEN LINK: blog] and fill it in with your own content.

Once you’re up and running, I would appreciate a backlink or shoutout if you can and please let me know about your blog!

2. Generated with Jekyll

This website is compiled with Jekyll. I like it. It’s dead simple. Perfect for this project.

3. Commit Transparency

Hosting on GitLab provides transparency. You may observe the commit history. Keep me honest.

4. Org files

I have always been an org user and now thanks to org-octopress I can write my blog posts in org too. The org source files are uploaded in [BROKEN LINK: blog].

Without content, a website is worthless. Integrating my org workflow has made it mentally easier for me to generate more awesome content.