What this website is

2017-07-06 | Html , Python , Web ,

I’m writing this 6 months after I finished the website so you’ll have to bear with me. Somehow i’ve survived first trimester at Uni. It’s been a stressful change to my life, to say the least! I’m happy that I have a few weeks off between trimesters to get back to some of my projects.

Anywho, if you’ve seen the sidebar on the main page you will know that this website is my ‘creative outlet’. I started around Christmas 2016 and worked on it after work during the summer holidays. The idea came up when I realised that I wanted my own space to spout random ideas, thoughts and ramblings to the world. Social media almost felt too restricting. With my own website, I could make it my own little world - a place I can modify and personalise to my heart’s content. When I found the student developer pack on github I found that I could effectively keep a webserver going for free for about a year until the free credit ran out.

First Revision, modifying one of the bootstrap base templates:

I have always liked google’s Material Design language and I wanted to mimic it in the design of the website. I went ahead and completely redid the site, and found a nice colour scheme using a palette generator. I ended up with this:

Edit: I just realised the text on the second image. Haha, woops.

After this point I kept the design and added all the other pages. In its current form, this is what the website looks like!

This new site has a bit of javascript to keep things interesting, and css link effects stolen from Codrops. I added bits and pieces here and there to the design and also have added a ‘favourite projects’ box right on the front page.

The front-end is cool and all, but the backend is the favourite part of this website. Using sqlite3 I designed a database to store all the posts and even made a dashboard that only I can access to edit and add new posts.

This is all done with flask. The hardest part of this website was probably designing the blog - it sorts the posts by post date and has pages to show 5 posts at a time. I also included a tag filter to reduce the posts down. I could probably open source the page but I don’t want to open myself up to any security holes. Overall i’m happy with how the website turned out and i’m excited to have a place to show off my projects.