anupam.de

Welcome to my personal site! It's a collection of my written creations, projects, and a bit about what I'm doing now.

How this site evolved

The site began in 2021 as a learning project when I moved into web development. I wanted a single place for my work and chose to build it from scratch with vanilla HTML and CSS — no frameworks, minimal design.

Over time, editing every page by hand became cumbersome. The site was refactored to a static site generator: content now lives in Markdown and YAML, and a small Python build (Jinja2 + Markdown) generates the HTML. This was done in one morning using Cursor.

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Site refactor: static generator

The site was refactored from hand-written HTML to a Python static site generator. Editing happens in Markdown and YAML; Jinja2 templates and Python scripts produce HTML files from these and deploy them to a folder.

How it works

• Content (content/) – Markdown (with optional YAML front matter) and YAML data files.
• Templates (templates/) – Jinja2 base layout and page templates; base_path keeps nav and assets correct at any depth.
• Build – python build.py copies static assets into _site/, then renders each page. python build.py --serve builds and serves locally.

What is generated vs legacy

Generated from content/templates:

• Homepage – content/now.yaml + templates/now.html → _site/index.html
• About – content/about.md → _site/about/about.html
• Projects – content/projects.yaml → _site/projects/projects.html
• Writing index – content/writing.yaml → _site/writing/writing.html
• Essays – each content/essays/*.md → _site/writing/essays/<slug>.html
• Poetry (migrated) – each content/poetry/*.md → _site/writing/poetry/<slug>.html (only growingUp so far)

Still legacy (HTML copied as static):

• Poetry – Most poems are still in writing/poetry/*.html and are copied into _site/writing/poetry/. Only items with a matching content/poetry/*.md are built; the rest stay as legacy HTML.
• Short stories – writing/shortstories/*.html are copied as-is; no Markdown migration yet.
• Descriptify – projects/descriptify/ is copied as static HTML and linked from the projects page.

Quick reference

Task	Command
Build	python build.py
Build + local preview	python build.py --serve
Install	pip install -r requirements.txt