#The Story of my portfolio

Everyone needs an online domain of their own in these days.

It was like years back, I started feeling like getting a domain with my name on it and setting up a page to showcase things about me. At that time I was excited about typing my name in the URL bar and a .com where I can see my photos and my name there. After I started my front end career 3 years back I understood the importance of that portfolio also. It highly affects your presence in the world of wide web.

#The beginning

Some months back I bought the domain from BigRock. Of course, asim.com was not available and asim.me was way expensive and I settled with asimkt.com.

Then I started coding. I knew then this should be a place where I write things, my photos from Instagram (some not so good ones) should come and the first result whenever a person searches for ‘Asim KT’ in the Google.

I went for static site generators so that I could write the blog from the repository and it will come up in my site good without touching my code. I went through some generators like Jekyll and all and failed miserably.

#Netlify & Victor Hugo

I was using Netlify at the moment for my side projects like Zpeed and Image Baker* *and it’s a great product for hosting static sites. It was one of their weekly mail where they talked about their static site generator called Victor Hugo and I decided to use it. I created a new project and did some style changes and I created this:

I should tell that I stumbled upon some bottlenecks where I was stuck due to limited documentation and number of people who actually used V.Hugo and I managed to solve them at the time. I thought about writing a blog about the process but I forgot to note down it. 😣

Anyway, this was (is at the time of writing) my site for some months. There were some issues with V.Hugo:

1. Limited documentation and support
2. Little hard to implement (For me at least)
3. Not so active project. Netlify is busy making their service awesome and may not get time for the generator.
4. Not using any frameworks. Coding is hard

I understood this because I kind of started searching for other approaches when I find Phenomic.

#Phenomic

Phenomic is yet another static site generator which used React for the front end. Basically, we can use any other framework, but they only support react now!

I created a branch for the *phenomic* and followed their documentation for a simple site. As usual, my laziness struck me mainly because I already had a live site going on. But I completed the Getting started guide and got a text-only site which had lists of blogs and next-previous buttons. And I stopped.

A Few days back I ran the project again and I was LOST. I didn’t remember what I was doing, and what’s the next step. I had to read the same documentation again to start. But what happened was another thing. I saw another code snippet where I could generate sample phenomic site with some styles from the command line itself. Which follows like:

npm install phenomic
./node_modules/.bin/phenomic setup

which will create a sample site like this.

Then I added my contents, changed my footer, changed fonts and all. You can see the site at this time here.

I’m going to work on the styling more. I’ll update this article after that.

Thanks for reading.