Colophon of anto.pt

anto.pt is the website of me, Antonio.

I don't live in Portugal and I'm not Portuguese. I chose this domain because it looked like an abbreviation of my full name.

This website has changed a lot over time. I started having a personal website back when I was a teenager, on a different domain. I bought this domain in 2017 and self-hosted an instance of Ghost, at the time I thought it was the easiest way to start writing something without getting lost in technical and hosting details.

At the beginning, it was hosted on a Raspberry Pi B+ that I had at home. But I wanted to try something more production-ready, not because I started having visitors, but just for the sake of my own learning. I was still studying at university back then.

A rough timeline of the different tech stacks I tried:

2016 - Ghost (self-hosted)
2018 - Hugo (self-hosted, SSR)
2022 - HashNode (managed, didn't last long)
2022 - Next.js and TailwindUI (bought and used Spotlight theme)
2022 - Astro (ported Spotlight to be a static site layout)
2023 - univrs, my Rust website server built while iterating on Rust Server Components
2024 - gosmic, my no-frills no-dependencies Go website server (current)

While writing this page, I wanted to make a point about how the easier the tech stack, the more your content is going to last. It turns out, when checking with the Wayback Machine, that the Next.js version is the one that rendered the content without any style, while the SSR-generated pages were rendered as if the site was still up and running.

Design

Like the tech stack, the simplest design is the one that is going to last the longest. However, this doesn't play well with my tendency to keep changing things, experimenting, and having colorful elements.

Here's a few screenshots from the past:

Spotlight, the theme made by TailwindUI that I used with Next.js and later Astro.

Neo-brutalist I made myself for univrs. Flashy colors yet a clear navigation between sections.

Another theme I made that didn't last long, inspired by retrocomputing.

The current gosmic theme. Clean and minimal, yet colorful.

Analytics

I'm using a self-hosted instance of Plausible to track what pages are the most viewed. I usually don't write for other people, still I'm a bit curious to see if anything gets more traction.

Hosting

I have a single VPS where I keep most of my side projects, nothing big anyway, hosted at HostHatch.