A Fresh New Look: Revamping My Personal Blog

Three years ago, I built this personal blog during my second year at McGill, driven by a newfound passion for web development. It was my first attempt at combining Node.js, Express, and EJS templating into a real project. While the blog served as a creative outlet to share my thoughts, life soon got busy with internships, on-campus jobs, and club leadership roles. The blog website remained static—until now. This time, I gave the blog website a complete makeover. I started by redesigning the front end, introducing modern wave animations, cleaner navigation, and a more cohesive color palette to make it visually appealing and user-friendly. The original design was basic, and I wanted a website that better represented my personal growth. The new layout is responsive, ensuring it looks great across all devices. On the backend, I cleaned up outdated MongoDB queries by implementing modern, promise-based functions, making the code more efficient. I reorganized the file structure, separating public assets like CSS and images into dedicated folders to improve maintainability and prepare for deployment. I also shifted the hosting from Render to Microsoft Azure App Service, setting up continuous deployment through Azure DevOps. This new setup means any updates I push to my GitHub repository automatically update the live website. It was a huge step forward in understanding cloud hosting and CI/CD pipelines. I revamped the contact form, allowing users to submit their name, email, and message, with a personalized thank-you message displayed after submission. Looking back, it’s incredible to see how much I’ve learned since creating this blog. This project now feels like a true reflection of my journey—a mix of creativity, growth, and technical learning. I’m excited to continue building and sharing through it.