I made a personal website in high school with a friend around the year 2000. We wrote it in HTML by hand, and it was a static site where we posted images of our favorite cars and bikes. That site only exists now in our faint memories (literally, the master files for the site are long gone after dozens of hardware and software upgrades, and the hosting site (Tripod) has removed a bunch of their content from the wayback machine), and nowadays there are things like Jekyll that seem to make building websites much easier.
In the meantime, I became interested in learning about other cultures, namely China, which distracted me from my mathematical upbringing for most of the past 15 years. But now I am glad to have found a way to have the best of both worlds, thanks to my position in History and Digital Humanities. I think this is a healthy move.
I am trying out Jekyll for my new personal site, inspired by Amanda Visconti’s lesson on the Programming Historian. I hope it works and that in time it will look more sophisticated.