The plan of renovating my personal website, starkshaw.me, was originally drafted out at the beginning of last year. Then, we know what happened in 2020, this project has been postponed, until now.

I have found the old website no longer serve its purposes a while ago. It was in its shape while I was studying in university and applying for jobs. It went pretty obsolete after 2017. It was written in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was actually hard to maintain, despite its lightweight size. I’ve run two experiments side-by-side to see how can I host a blogging system with ease.

On one side, I was experimenting with Hexo on my Chinese-language website, xiaozhenba.ng. After few years of posting articles on it, I found it still can fulfill its purposes.

On this side, I used to integrate Medium with the old website. I found that although I don’t need to worry about code, I can’t really control the look of it. The design language difference is one major reason that I want to overhaul the entire website. With the knowledge I learned while designing xiaozhenba.ng, I got pretty comfortable with the tooling in my hand. Then, I planned to combine the previously CV website and blog together with some of my own design touch. The most of it has completed by March 2020. About that time, we got hit by the global pandemic. Since then, there were other things I had to worry about…

And now, here we are. I finally got time to polish the last bit of it. It is by no means that how it looks right now is perfect. I have some design tweaks in mind, that I may implement them later.

Oh, by the way: it has a true dark mode.