This Website! (est. 2021)

A few years ago, my dad showed me his website. It’s a collection of quick opinion pieces he’s written, as well as different things he’s done for employers to look at. While I didn’t particulary care about employers and colleges, I was excited about putting my opinions on the internet. That is what this website is, and I’ll go through how I built it.

Beginnings

My dad showed me Hugo, the software he used to build his website. All I had to do was create a folder in my terminal for the website, create an account and run the command

hugo

It automatically created all of the folders I would need to start. Since I was new to the whole idea of building a website, I used the theme etch, a minimalistic format that could still be made to look nice.

Of course, I didn’t even think about customizing my homepage; I just wanted to write. So I created my very first post within my contents folder: Pizza Places I’ve Been To (Oct 26, 2021). Since it is a relatively short post, here is the code for it:

---
title: Pizza Places I've Been To
date: 2021-10-26
---
Over the years, I have been into **NUMEROUS** pizza places (the best place), and I think it would be cool to mention them:

1. Otto
2. Papa Ginos
3. Regina Pizzeria
4. Blaze (my dad is not a fan of this place)
5. Upper Crust
6. Oath (we are not big fans)
7. Penguin Pizza (**WE ARE HUGE FANS**)
8. Little Stevies
9. Woody's
10. Crazy Dough's
11. Pino's
12. Stoked
13. Brookline Spa
14. And any other pizza places (I don't *think* I mentioned them **ALL**)

This is one of my favorite posts from early on. Though simple, it was my first time writing anything like it, and it felt good. So for the rest of 2021 and a couple months after that, I wrote several more posts that you can find in my About My Life and My Views and Knowledge sections.

And then for whatever reason, I stopped. Either I was busy or lazy, because I didn’t post for two years. I think I just got bored and moved on to other projects.

Revival and Formatting

But by my junior year, I started thinking a lot about college and my life beyond high school. I heard a bunch of talk about resumes and applications, and figured I should have a record of all of my projects. So I created the My Projects section and got started on the website again.

I created posts for most of my projects, like my smart mirror, my AI assistant, and my document editor.

My website by now looked full of life again, but it was still pretty ugly. So I looked at my dad’s again, saw how pretty it was and thought:

I want in on that (Liam Loughnane, envious wimp)

So I went to the internet forums to learn how to customize my formatting by tweaking with my main.css file. Here is an example of changes I’ve made:

body {
    font-size: 22px;
    font-size: 1.7rem;
    color: #ffffff;
    background-color: #232322; 
    width: 75%;
    margin: 0 auto;
    padding: 0 6px;
    line-height: 1.4em;
}

In here, I customized my default body text to be white and a different font and spacing, changed my background, and figured out the margins. I have dozens of such bits of code, customizing the look of my website to my liking.

I wish I could show you how my website looked before this undertaking. But if I did, you wouldn’t be able to see my other posts, because you would be turned to stone.

Conclusion

I am extremely happy with this project, for one reason (the same reason I like my document editor project): I can keep on adding to it. There is always more to write about, and as long as I want to I’ll never get bored with working on www.liaml.co. I recommend making your own website if you want your opinions and accomplishments to be seen, whether by employers or by universities or by your future self.