About the blog

Almost 2 years ago I bought 2 domains nirmatr.in and nirmaker.com.

Nirmatr - Sanskrit - Means Maker or Creator
Nirmaker - Doesnt mean anything, but I thought of it as a cool wordplay on the Sanskrit word and the English word "Maker". ;p

Initially I vibecoded a portfolio site with deep purples and crazy animations. It was deployed here for a while.
Side note: I have also deployed a personal Immich server (Self hosted google photos alternative) on a subdomain hosted on my raspberry pi at home. More on this in a future blog post...

After some time of having that flashy site, I realized that I didn't like it very much and decided to redo the portfolio site. I created the asthetic completely by myself using CSS and HTML. I filled all the details as per my LinkedIn profile. Made sure it's printable by default, and woah is it beautiful. I decided I won't use any resume builders as I can just write html and print it.

Once I created the portfolio site, I liked the asthetic so much that I decided to create this blog, using just basic HTML and CSS and a sprinkle of JS.
PS: I also created a theme switcher with a little help from my AI friend.

How it works

1. It all runs on a master blog_template.html file. This defines the structure for every post, with variables like {{TITLE}} waiting to be swapped out.
2. A bash script, createblog.sh, drives the whole thing. You just give it a title, and it handles the rest.
3. First, it generates a clean URL slug from the title using regex—handling things like spaces and special characters automatically.
4. Then, it creates the folder structure and uses sed to generate the final index.html from the template, filling in the details.
5. It even updates the main blog/index.html listing page, injecting the new post entry automatically so it shows up on the site immediately.

This setup makes life a lot easier:

• It keeps things consistent. Every post looks right and has the correct meta tags without me having to double-check.
• It's fast. I can spin up a new post environment in seconds and start writing immediately, instead of fiddling with files and folders.
• It removes friction. The less administrative work I have to do, the more likely I am to actually write something.