Back after eight years: rebuilding khendaniel.com

My last blog post here was in September 2018. Eight years. 😅

I only noticed how bad it was when I opened the site again. The About page still said I'd been "a developer for almost 2 years" and that I was working at my old company. My profile photo was gone: I had linked it straight from Instagram, and that link expired a long time ago. The résumé link was dead too. The whole thing was a time capsule of 2018 me.

So I finally rebuilt it.

It started with small tools

Lately I've been making little single-page tools for myself and the people around me: a 3D bed planner when we were figuring out if a bed would fit the room, a habit tracker, and a pick board for League of Legends Worlds 2026.

The problem was they didn't really have a home. So I made one: project.khendaniel.com. It's a plain GitHub repo with one folder per tool, served by GitHub Pages on a subdomain. Adding a new tool is just adding a folder and pushing.

Cleaning up the domain

While I was in GoDaddy's DNS settings, I found a few things I'd been ignoring for years:

My main domain only had one of GitHub Pages' four IP addresses. It worked, but if that one server had a bad day, so did my site. I added the other three.
My photography site had been broken since who knows when. The repo was set to use photography.khendaniel.com, but there was no DNS record for it, so the subdomain pointed nowhere. One CNAME record later, it's back.
The new project subdomain is one more CNAME pointing to thekhenzie.github.io.

Goodbye, Metalsmith

In 2018 I built this site with Metalsmith, a static site generator. I wrote about it in Building in action. It was fun back then, but eight years later the setup was fragile. It needed old Node packages to build, and my deploy script would have quietly changed my domain to www.khendaniel.com the next time I ran it.

So the new site is just plain HTML and CSS. No build step and nothing to install. If I want to change something, I edit the file and push. For a personal site, that's all I need.

The design, take two

My first attempt at the redesign was a very minimal, dark, text-only page. Looking at it, it felt too dark and too plain. It didn't feel like me.

So for the second try I went back to my own photos. Most of them are Manila skylines, sunsets and street scenes I took around 2018. The colors on the site come from those photos too: the blue of a clear afternoon sky and the orange of a Manila sunset. The photos themselves are on the home page now, scattered like printed snapshots, plus a small gallery that links to the full portfolio.

The projects page has real screenshots of everything, from the small tools to client work like GuardHouse, where I work now, and older experiments like a Chrome extension that hides your Reddit username.

What I kept

The old blog posts are still here, at the same addresses, in the archive. They're a little cringe to reread, but they're mine. 😄

What's next

Worlds 2026 starts on October 15, and I already did way too much research for my Pick'Ems. So the next post is my predictions. Let's see how wrong I am.

If you want to say hi, my email is on every page. Thanks for reading!