When was this website created?
History of my personal website and how I learned HTML.
Short Answer
I don’t exactly remember when this website was originally created. It was probably in 2013 or earlier. In 2018 I registered the domain nalsai.de. I originally learned HTML by generating it with OpenOffice and looking at the source code until I understood it. Later I used W3Schools.
Long Answer
I started out using OpenOffice to generate HTML and then analyzing and improving the markup it created but quickly moved on to completely writing it myself. The website was served by a simple HTTP server that was included in my parents’ phone and internet package. The url was anminisa.de/nils. It now just redirects to my current website.
Sadly I don’t know when exactly I started and I didn’t keep any old versions of my website, but I at least found a version of it from 2013. Here are some screenshots:
I removed some pictures from the last screenshot to make the page fit better into the screenshot, but you get the idea. Due to how simple it was it even scaled decently to different screen sizes. In later designs, I had some trouble with that.
I’ve been using Visual Studio Code since it came out in 2015 to write the newer versions of the website and sometimes used W3Schools to look up HTML stuff.
In 2018 I completely redesigned the website and used MDBootstrap as a UI toolkit for the first time. Everything before then was completely handwritten so I had trouble with the design not adapting well to different screen sizes. The general design of the website is still pretty similar to how it was when I used MDBootstrap. You can find an example of that design at https://royal.nalsai.de/. The animations on that site were added as a joke and were never part of any other site, although I did use some less obnoxious animations for a short time. For consistency and shared elements across multiple sites, I started using Jekyll, as it is the default of GitHub Pages, which I also started using in 2018 (although I switched to Netlify pretty quickly). At the end of the year, I finally bought the domain nalsai.de, which I have been using ever since. It was registered on 2018-11-27T09:11:00+00:00.
In 2020 I switched to Bootstrap 4 due to better usability and performance. I also switch from Jekyll to Hugo in 2020 and in 2021 I updated the website to Bootstrap 5.