Old homepage iterations

^{DATE : 02.03.2026}

My homepage has had quite a few different iterations over the years. Let’s take a peek

All of these were constructed in Ruby, with MkII also having a Go helper server to help with page redirections and JSON metadata (required to implement “fastloading”, a term I used then for using JS to patch in new content instead of requiring a full page reload). Last iteration before this one, I decided to switch to Jekyll for templating.

Typical to the site generators I’ve constructed is using separate files to provide metadata for a given page, instead of having it inline with content (e.g. like Jekyll does with Markdown files). See below for an (unfortunately undated) example. Jekyll is the only exception to this pattern as it is designed to use metadata associated to Markdown files.

# encoding: utf-8

require_relative './cv_page_helpers.rb'

ticket.name = "Curriculum Vitae"
ticket.pre_render_proc = CVPageHelpers::render_helper_proc
ticket.source = {type: "erubis", template: "main", file: "cv_template.erb"}
ticket.route = ['cv', 'en']
ticket.lang = 'eng'
ticket.menu = ['CV', 'English']
ticket.render_breadcrumbs = false

ticket.alternative_urls = [["about"]]

# Mark that this page has a nonstandard layout
ticket.extras[:nonstandard_layout] = true

To conclude: these days though, my tastes have changed towards more rigorously typed languages, hence my current static site generator is made in Rust. However, Ruby will still hold a place in my memories for being one of the first programming languages I could say I properly “learned”.