Published on 18/05/2025

Coming back!

I think I am now at my second iteration of building my personal website, third if counting my first-ever homepage at Geocities back in 1999. It was den-dhanie.geocities.com; no trace of it can be found now. I wonder if I can still piece it together from my archived old files. Yeah, I have archived my files vigorously since 1995. Though some have been lost forever due to disk corruption, inadvertent deletion, and general neglect, at least some of them survived that 30-year journey.

My first serious attempt was in 2010, when I worked in sales. I remember using Joomla back then. I put my marketing materials, hobbies, and other interests there. I even put Google AdSense, which I clicked myself over and over again, only to find out that I got banned from AdSense! That website was danieladinugroho.net, and it was archived partially by the Internet Archive.

I moved on to another job, and I was quite busy going all over Indonesia to the point that I forgot my website. That website ended sometime in 2017, I think. The subscription has expired, and the payment was long overdue. I lost all the contents. The second attempt was in 2021, which is basically a half-hearted attempt to restore the 2010 website. I switched to WordPress, which I thought would be easier to manage. This, too, got neglected and almost forgotten. The subscription lapsed, and I lost the domain, danugroho.net.

Now, fast forward to 2025. I have this itch to build my digital presence in this sea of information, perhaps with the hope that what I created may survive and serve its purpose longer than I. Perhaps it may find its place within the model weights of an LLM, stored within the pattern of digital pathways of an all-knowing AI. Maybe. So, within a morning, I grabbed my domain name back, danugroho.net. I like it because it’s quite short, and still an abbreviation of my identity. Now, what CMS should I use, Joomla, WordPress, or something else? After a brief consultation with ChatGPT, I stumbled upon this supposedly simple system called Astro. Right, I’m jumping into it, and within a few hours, I produced a somewhat decent, basic website, built with Astro and served through Nginx. I like its simplicity.

If I look back through the Internet Archive, and check out my old websites, I feel that I’m regressing towards the bare minimum. My like the layout and style of my 2010 website so much, to be honest. My 2021 website is somewhat “meh”, and this current website, wow, this looks like just the barebones of HTML! Looks quite amateurish! I started thinking twice about my choice of Astro, to be honest. Anyway, I’ll just keep going for now.

Is a personal website still relevant nowadays? Yes. Is it still worth writing every article yourself, in spite of many other people writing their articles with the help of AI? Yes, why not? I will still spell-check my article and ensure that it’s still grammatically correct, but I will not use AI to write it. Let it be the real statue crafted by a sculptor’s hands rather than a perfect statue mass-produced through a CNC machine. One day, my hands will not be able to type this quickly enough, and one day my eyes can’t read the characters I typed through this small terminal, and one day I simply can’t be bothered to think about my website anymore. Before those days arrive, I’d better write all I can. Will my mind outlive my body? That would be fascinating, but let’s work with what’s real today.

From now on, I will scrape my archives, put together what’s worth posting, and continue creating new works.

Tags: #html#blogging#webdev#astro