Welcome to my personal page

Trying to build my very own simple CMS with no frameworks nor libraries.

I built my first website back in 2002 through the only user-friendly option available back then - Geocities. I still have the URL: http://www.geocities.com/uribarialex/1.html but unfortunately, the site was not preserved and I was unable to find it archived elsewhere. Since then, I tried many different things to host my site: free hostings with site builders, Wordpress, static website generators like Publii, more complex static website generators with CLI and returning back to Wordpress again. I was never fully satisfied with the result (except, probably, with GeoCities...).

So I decided it is time to build something of my own. Why not build a minimalist CMS that covers the basics? Ideally, serving content with a unique HTML file. And my personal webstie will be the testground for such CMS. As soon as the CMS will reach MVP, I'll publish a GitHub repo with the source code so anyone will be able to use it and contribute.

This is strictly personal website. All opinions in this website are of the author. This website is for personal leasure and learning purposes only and should not be taken seriously in any way. Just have fun, enjoy and take everything written here with enrormous grain of salt.

You can reach me via LinkedIn profile referenced in the footer of this page.

Updates

  • December 4th, 2023 - Started the project
  • December 4th, 2023 - Started working on automatic page generator
  • December 6th, 2023 - Created the compiler to read markdown files in certain folder and translate these into html. Markdown files include "matter" part with metda details of the post
  • December 27th, 2023 - Updated the homepage with the content generated by the node.js app
  • January 7th, 2024 - Decided change the post editing file from MarkDown to html. MarkDown is very limited compared to html. Also, updated CSS of the site. Again, no frameworks, no libraries. Everything manually crafted.
  • 18th February 2024 - Updated navigation management: now blog entries will be located in the blog folder. This required an updated to navigation function to ensure the links are escalating to higher directories from files in child directories.
  • 11th May 2024 - Small visual updates. Started working on photos pages and media managements capabilities of the CMS.
  • 28th May 2024 - Created a photo gallry page that will be my playground for image managing.
  • 31 August 2024 - two big updates: first, I made this repository public, so you can see how the CMS is built on the background. You can find the code here. On top of this, I updated how blog posts are created and updated: now you only need to write the blog post, no need to worry about the backgrounf image, publication date, etc.. Everything will be added automatically from the json file.

What's next?

Add to the page/post JSON file the location of main image so it can be stored as a variable and updated on every site build Next I will work on category and meta description of the posts. Also will start working on the management of the categorization.
[Partially done] Next most important update will be the image management. I still don't know how to implement this in a reasonably automated fashion, but this is a priority. An image is better than 100 words!