The idea of a personal website can easily begin with a few simple sentences: create a landing page, explain what I work with, and add projects and writing. From there, the first technical question seems almost inevitable: which framework should it use?

That is not where andraspako.hu began.

We first tried to understand what kind of place we wanted to create. Not an online CV, not a menu of services, and not a portfolio that runs out of things to say after a few striking visual elements. The aim was a professional home that could grow over time: a space capable of showing depth of thought, connections between subjects and an expanding body of content.

That decision ultimately proved more important than any technology choice that followed.

Markdown documents came before code

The first tangible result was not a website. It was a set of Markdown files.

The design brief captured the site’s purpose, audience, tone and visual principles. The information architecture defined its content spaces. Separate documents described the visual system, content plan, important decisions and, later, the publishing process itself.

This may initially sound like too much preparation for a personal website. In practice, it gave every later idea something to be measured against.

When a new animation, sentence or navigation pattern emerged, the question was not simply whether it looked good. We also asked whether it belonged to the professional character the site needed to convey: clear, structured, calm, accessible and recognisably its own.

The order of the process was therefore deliberate:

idea
  → design brief
  → information architecture
  → visual language
  → content
  → technology decisions
  → development
  → testing
  → publishing

Not because every project must follow this exact sequence, but because here the technology needed to serve the thinking.

Data became a visual language

The site’s defining motif grew from three elements: node, edge and structure. They were not decorative graphics added afterwards. They came from the same world the site discusses: data models, graphs, architectures and data flows.

The opening hero is therefore not a static image. As the page scrolls, the same points and connections gradually rearrange themselves:

DATA → STRUCTURE → INFORMATION

The movement makes the site’s central statement visible. Data alone is not yet information; structure, meaning and context make it usable.

The first version only knew the vertical story. Scrolling down revealed professional depth, but it gradually became clear that one direction was not enough. About, Projects and Writing are not consecutive chapters. They are spaces that exist alongside one another.

That is how the second dimension emerged. Depth continues down the page, while horizontally the visitor chooses which space to enter. Swipe on mobile, screen arrows, keyboard and touchpad on desktop all make the same system navigable.

This was not a navigation trick added to the page. It made the structure visible.

Only then did the technology get a name

Once we knew the kind of site we wanted, choosing how to build it became much easier.

Astro suited the task well. The site is primarily about content and experience, so most finished pages can be generated as static HTML. Components and focused JavaScript add interaction where it is needed, without sending an entire client-side application to every visitor.

The source code was placed in a Git repository and then on GitHub. This was more than a backup. Every meaningful change gained a history: what changed, when it happened and which earlier state could be restored if necessary.

The first working localhost build only proved that the system fitted together technically. The real work followed: typography, breakpoints, scrolling rhythm, animation states, keyboard interaction, mobile Safari and support for reduced motion.

The site did not arrive in one large development step. It grew through many small cycles:

idea → implementation → browser check → refinement

In those cycles, the position of a sentence or the meaning of a button was often just as important as the code itself.

The content did not need a CMS

When work on the Writing section began, one question quickly appeared: how would a new article be published? Would it be worth building an administration interface or introducing a full content management system?

The actual need was simpler. One author, an infrequent editorial process and content written in a technical environment. A CMS would have introduced more operational work than the problems it solved.

On the final evening of a holiday, sitting on the terrace with a whisky and a cigar, the decision became final: Writing would use a simple, stable, Markdown-based publishing system.

Every article is a .md file. Structured data at the top describes its title, summary, type, topics and publication status. Ordinary Markdown follows underneath.

An article marked draft: true can already be read locally in its final design, but it receives no public article page. Publishing only requires changing the status, adding a date and pushing the change to GitHub. Reading time is calculated automatically.

This is not a system designed to provide the largest possible set of features. It does exactly what is currently needed, which is what keeps it simple.

From localhost to production

The domain was registered through Rackhost. Registration ensures that the name andraspako.hu belongs to me, but it does not, by itself, say where the website can be found.

The completed Astro site was deployed to Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare’s GitHub integration watches the repository’s main branch. When a new commit arrives, it downloads the source, runs the build and places the generated files on its global network.

The first production build went live on a temporary pages.dev address. This made it possible to verify the landing page, horizontal navigation, mobile layout and the first published article independently, while the real domain still pointed to its previous parking page.

Only then did the DNS move. Rackhost remained the domain registrar, while the name servers moved to Cloudflare. DNS records connected andraspako.hu and www.andraspako.hu to the Pages project. Cloudflare issued the HTTPS certificates automatically, and a permanent redirect sent the www version to the shorter canonical domain.

The first working production build arrived on Monday evening. On Tuesday morning, over the first coffee of the day, andraspako.hu took over the live traffic.

There was something particularly illustrative about what followed. At eight that morning, maintenance work around the local power lines cut the electricity at home. The website continued to run. The source lived on GitHub, the finished site on Cloudflare’s network; the local computer was only needed for the next change.

The first complete automated chain

After launch, we changed a short piece of text on the homepage. The Astro build ran locally, and the change was committed to the GitHub main branch.

No manual file upload happened after that:

git push
  → GitHub
  → Cloudflare build
  → automatic deployment
  → andraspako.hu

Cloudflare detected the new commit, rebuilt the site and, a few moments later, the new text appeared on the custom domain.

This tested more than one small modification. It proved that the entire publishing chain worked. The same process can deliver a new article, a new project or any later development.

What was ultimately built

From the outside, the result is a website. From the inside, it is closer to a small, connected publishing system:

  • Markdown documents preserve the principles and content;
  • Git and GitHub preserve the history of change;
  • Astro turns the source into fast, static pages;
  • Cloudflare Pages builds and publishes automatically;
  • Cloudflare provides DNS, HTTPS and redirects for the custom domain;
  • mobile and desktop interactions provide different entrances into the same content system.

The most important lesson is not the name of a technology.

First, we had to clarify what we wanted to say, in what structure and in what voice. Once that became visible, technology decisions stopped being goals in their own right and became natural consequences of the idea.

With that, V1 of andraspako.hu was complete. The system works, the structure stands and the publishing path is open. The next phase is no longer primarily about construction.

It is about bringing the place to life.