I've been toying around with the thought of a personal website/portfolio for a while. A landing page for my digital life, and something that could grow with me.
In the past I've played with simple static sites, as well as larger CMS applications like Joomla and Drupal. These all were fun experiments that didn't last. Hosted by opening ports in my home router.
What I found is that if the site was too simple it was hard to maintain and make it look polished without being an expert, and the complicated applications took a lot of time to maintain.
That's where this site shines.
What I've found recently is that a personal site does not need a large application stack to be useful. This one is built with Zola, Markdown, and a few templates so that the content stays portable, the output stays fast, and the publishing path is straightforward.
Did I intentionally complicate that by keeping the repository in my self-hosted Forgejo instance, running a Forgejo runner in my Proxmox environment, and building a CI/CD workflow that deploys development branches to two Caddy hosts before publishing main to Cloudflare Pages?
Yes.
But giving up a complicated application stack doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have fun.
But really somewhere in the back of my head said the more time I spend building out the flow, the more likely I'll stick to updating it, especially if it's just a commit and push. Now adding a new project or note is a small content change rather than a new application feature. The result is less machinery to maintain and more attention available for the work being shared.