There is a particular pleasure in shipping a page that needs nothing but a browser and a link. No build step whispering in the background, no runtime waiting to hydrate what was already readable. The document arrives whole, and that feels honest.
I have rebuilt this corner of the web more times than I care to admit — always chasing the latest stack, always convinced the framework would finally make the writing easier. It rarely did. What helped was narrowing the surface: one column for words, one for context, and colours calm enough to stay out of the way.
If you are starting a personal site today, consider borrowing from an era when structure came before spectacle. Semantic markup, a handful of typefaces, and margins wide enough to breathe. The rest can wait until you have something worth saying twice.