Hello! My name is Manuel (the kino who was here), and this site is my way to share with the world what it is that I do.
I spend most of my days writing code behind a computer, so naturally some of it will leak here, but you will also be able to find some of my other interests like 🎞 photography, 🎧 music, and 🎥 cinema.
The site is currently a work in progress, and I try to bring new content to it on my free time. I know that it ain't much, but it's honest work.
For a long time, I've had a wish to have my own small website where I can host my photos, blog, music, reviews, etc. I've tried at first using Wordpress back in 2019, but the set-up and maintenance part drew me away from the idea.
Because of this, since 2020 (I think...) I've hosted my personal site kinowashere.com using Deno Deploy with Fresh (basically serverless React, very cool stuff). This was fine since I was learning React at the time, and it was a nice experience. Most importantly, it is a painless set-up that requires 0 maintenance.
However, this project was lacking a way to host multimedia (for my photography), and since I didn't want to get in the security hell that is setting up S3, I just left that site unfinished, holding only links to my Linkedin and my CV.
Early this 2024 I started taking seriously the topic of hosting my photos somewhere that isn't boring flickr or God forbid INSTAGRAM! Thus I gave S3 a shot, but set-up, maintenance, and potential costs, drove me far, far away from this idea. To top it off, I've grown tired of working with these Enterprise-level frameworks and libraries, such as React for projects that don't require them. Everytime I look into the old kinowashere.com project and think of adding anything to that React, it becomes a burden. The complexity, especially for such a small project that requires no front-end interactivity, is overkill. So I found myself looking for a simple, straightforward solution to my personal site.
And that's when it came back to me: reject modernity? embrace tradition? neocities??? 🔥 hell yea!!
> but it doesn't have a backend... how do I display new data? -> SSG!
> what about db?? -> set up locally if needed for the ssg... or just json files lol :D
For those who don't know: Neocities is web hosting for static pages. It's, in my opinion, the best solution for a simple custom page for needs such as a small blog or such.
There was one part that remained unsolved: how will I build the site? I'm not going to rawdog the html + css, so I need a SSG. Going back to the whole pls no more complexity spirit, I decided to not go into any pre-established framework, and just build my own SSG centered around the needs of my own site. And that's how I ended up with Asai: the shallow site generator. It is still private as it's a work in progress, but as soon as I'm happy with it, and have added proper documentation + tests for it, I'll make it public for anyone to use.
So now I'm doing this site in Neocities with my own SSG because it's somehow the simplest way I've found to have my custom site up and running in this day and age. Well, maybe it's not the best way, or even the simplest actually, but at least it has managed to bring back the fun in coding without so much overhead, and with all the good ol' days fun ☀️
kinowashere, 2024
PS: this site is better enjoyed in desktop!
