Building A Website With My Barehand

26 Oct, 2025

Read an article: https://rokcso.com/p/back-to-basics-web-development . The author created a website by his barehand, code by code, without any build process, waiting time, framework or component library. In his words, "I control every pixel of the website". This sounds really interesting. Maybe someday I'll do that too. Migrate my digital garden to a pure HTML+CSS website. My content is just Markdown plain text files.

Updated 26th Oct 2025, I am already doing this, following Derek Sivers' Tech Indenpendance Simple Website section. Since there is not much content for now, I would like to hold because I don't know what to add yet. But I guess there will be tech/web/computer content.

There are a few benifits building a website with my barehand. The best part is I know (almost) what every line of code does. When I add (a href="{link}")¹ I know it is a hyperlink. When I add (img src="{link}") I know it is going to be an image. And I know exactly where they will be on my website.

In Derek's article, I bought a VPS on Vultr. I used this service provider a few years ago and it was good. My WordPress blog was based on a $5 Ubuntu could compute which just work. Speed is ok because of the location. I studied a few basic website creating skill (SSL, Apache, Nginx, etc) and they still benefit me today.

But then I realized I was spending too much time for non-writing stuff: too much security protection to maintain, too much Apache/Nginx code to learn and write, and stuff like that. So I moved my blog to a virtual hosting located in HK and it just work so good and peace. Becasue of that, I am able to focus on my writing more than before.

There is a trade-off. More on content, less on tech. To be honest, I don't exactly know how to build a website starting from scratch. Every website I have know is work of somebody else. I never felt the pride of building one myself. Things may change the moment I have a VPS and a website with pure HTML and CSS. Derek chooses the OpenBSD for OS I might add. It is different from any linux distro, and it looks more fast and clean. I would like to learn that very much.

Day 10.