How does one build a website?

There are so many different paths one could take towards building a website, and one of the most popular paths is to use a service such as wordpress, squarespace or wix.

I have used those kinds of services in the past since I had earnestly believed that building a website was not a one-man job. But as it turns out, I managed to do it. This might sound silly but I had convinced myself throughout the course of my life that I'm a really slow learner - but now I don't think that's true anymore. The thing that made me realize this was the fact that anything one may find fun won't ever feel as hard as something one finds boring, and using services like wix and wordpress was the real issue, since they will limit your creativity and for that reason be boring.

As soon as I wanted to do something even remotely advanced on my old wix site, I was forced to add manual JS and CSS blocks everywhere. And as I kept layering functions on top of one another the site started becoming hard to maintain due to all that manual labour. This is obviously not fun.

The importance of having fun

Everything changed once I started learning Rust. After a few months of working in Rust I felt confident enough to build a backend using the Askama and Axum crates. The first website I built in Rust was a lot of fun to build. Although, I started running into the same issues I had with my aforementioned Wix site, where the layers of CSS and HTML was making it hard for me to add new changes. But as it turns out, I just hadn't read the documentation clearly enough, because Askama has HTML macros!

This website you're reading on right now is my second attempt. And without those valuable lessons I learned from my first attempt, this blog wouldn't be possible for instance. Every blogpost here starts out as a markdown file that gets parsed to HTML using the markdown crate, then my backend uses its contents to dynamically fill in a HTML macro that formats everything and applies it to the site with URL fragments.

The things I'm describing now were exactly the things that scared me when I first started building websites back as a teenager, but honestly, it only looks hard (insert Rust joke here).

Instead of relying on youtube tutorials and reddit threads for learning programming, I just started reading documentation instead. And while it's hard in the beginning, it becomes fun once you've done it enough times and gotten comfortable with it - but in that respect, I guess it works the same as any other skill in life. When climbing a mountain, you will trip and fall if you're always looking up at the peak and not focusing on where your feet are situated.

Stay creative

Of course, this site's main purpose may be to function as a portfolio and landing page, but it's also something I should feel free to treat as an outlet for my creativity. Building something from scratch is fun, due to how satisfying such an activity can be. This is true for any kind of art - speaking as a musician, I'd argue that building a website is much like writing a song.