A Website of My Own

I build a lot of websites. For a long time, every one included a link to un1970ix.com, even though I had no website running there. I already owned the domain, but I couldn't decide on the design or implementation.

In Turkish, we say "Terzi kendi söküğünü dikemez." Roughly, a tailor cannot mend his own clothes.

A personal website has a loose brief. It should feel like you, but that leaves plenty undecided. Should the work come first, or the writing? How much room should the music get? Several versions could work, and knowing how to build them doesn't tell you which to choose.

I suspect "personal" adds to the difficulty. A design choice can feel like a judgment about your taste, and a technical choice like a statement about how you think software should be built. If the website has to express everything about you, you can keep adding requirements whenever a design gets close to meeting them.

Someone following one of my links might want to see more work or contact me. My empty domain provided neither.

Visitors should be able to find a note, read it comfortably, and find the music. A heading too far from its paragraph or a link that's difficult to spot gives me something specific to fix and check.

I care about the details, but comparing typefaces indefinitely because another might be better is different from fixing text that's hard to read. Even after a page works, there are other versions I could spend time building.

I love Swiss design, so its typography, alignment, and proportion gave me a direction. Here, that became a compact layout with deliberate spacing and IBM Plex type. Mono is used for navigation and small details, Sans for headings, and Serif for articles. The heptagons are my recurring signature.

The pages share that structure while leaving room for differences. Music has a more expressive palette, shimmering dots, and an animated photograph. A new note uses the existing article layout, so adding one means working on the text without redesigning the page.

The site uses Astro and Deno to build static pages from Markdown notes. I want to understand it, maintain it, and add content without making each addition a separate software project.

A first version can be complete for the material it has today. It needs clear navigation and readable pages, including on small screens and with a keyboard. It doesn't need a layout for every kind of thing I might eventually publish.

As the site grows, a longer article may reveal an awkward part of the layout, or more work may need a different way of being organized. Then I'll have a specific reason to change the design, and content to check the changes against.