Evolution of makol.li

This homepage started as a playground to learn the basics of HTML/CSS and dip my toes into hosting.
In this post, I’m walking through the different versions of the site, how the code evolved, and what I picked up along the way.

makol.li vintage-v1

I’ve always been a nostalgic guy, so going for a vintage-style website was an easy choice once I registered my domain.
I stumbled across this brilliant Bootstrap theme: BOOTSTRA.386 .
At that stage the site was nothing more than static HTML/CSS. Simple, but it worked.

You can demo the website here: Demo

makol.li vintage-v2

When preparing for my Web Engineering 2 class (where we worked with Express and JavaScript), I decided to redo the site as an exercise.
This time I built it as a small Express app that would dynamically render Markdown files into HTML, so adding or updating content was as simple as editing a .md file.

For rendering I used marked , and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
But there were downsides:

• Integrating the converted HTML into Bootstrap layouts was messy.
• The design looked nice but wasn’t great for long reads: not “easy on the eyes.”
• Running server-side JS just to render Markdown felt like overhead for a personal blog.

All in all, I learned a ton and really enjoyed the process, but in the end it made sense to move on to something more practical. With mature open-source solutions like Hugo , it was an easy choice to leave this project behind and continue experimenting elsewhere.

The full source code for this version can be found here: github/makol.li-express

makol.li-express
├── notes
│   ├── 11_VPS-Management.md
│   ├── 12_FreeBSD DNS-DHCP.md
│   ├── 13_TastyIgniter.md
│   ├── 14_Selfhosted Mailserver.md
│   ├── 15_Homelab.md
│   ├── 21_x220 Modding.md
│   ├── 22_Flashing openWRT Meraki Switch.md
│   ├── 31_Automating with Python.md
│   ├── 32_BufferOverflow 32Bit.md
│   ├── FreeBSD
│   └── x220_images