Why this blog is so darn basic

Note: The post originally appeared on jonknowles.win

Trust me, I've heard of WordPress. I think it's pretty great, actually. It's free and open-source, it takes about ten minutes to set up, and it's able to do dozens of cool tricks that this blog could only dream of. So why would I make a blog that sucks so much?

There's two reasons. First and foremost, I wanted the challenge of building a blog from the ground up. I've done a bit of web development here and there, but I've always used frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation and a ready-made CMS like WordPress. This was useful experience to get my feet wet in the world of web development, but I want to take things a step further. I am starting a Master's program in Software Engineering this week, so I wanted to take off the training wheels. So this baby runs on nothing but raw HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL.

Okay, maybe that's a stretch. I use the NBBC BBCode parser for formatting the blog posts and I use phpMyAdmin to serve them. But that's about it. Hopefully, as I go along, I'll add bells and whistles. Consider this version 1.0.

Secondly, I actually like ultra-simple aesthetics. The plain look of this site was inspired by the BetterMotherFuckingWebsite. Check it out: it shows how much formatting can be done in seven lines of CSS. My own style sheet has a few more declarations, but I have more pages to format as well. At the very least, this page doesn't look like every single other website these days: big fields of solid color, giant splash images, single page design, and always three icon-y things with big words under them. This page isn't better than those pages. In fact, it's certainly way worse. But it's mine, and I like it, so deal with it.