History of my personal website

I started messing with websites back in 2010, which doesn’t seem that long ago. I consider myself quite lucky because I entered the web world at the beginning of the HTML5 & CSS3 era and I skipped the “good old days” when there were no rounded corners, no shadows, no animations and no web fonts. And yes, Flash was still a thing. Anyway, back then I didn’t have a personal site because I though it was cool to use a fancy and mysterious domain name. And that’s why I bought niuenso.com, a domain I still own and it’s currently unused. Niuenso was a playground and for that site I designed and coded a couple of fun onepage websites.

After a couple of years I decided to leave Niuenso behind and bought my current domain because I realized that it was quite silly to hide behind a brand. One of the first site I coded for the new manuelmoreale.com was this one:

I had the idea for this design while watching a Japanese anime. I think it was Ghost In The Shell but I could be wrong. Anyway this one stayed online for quite a while and got featured in a bunch of different places which at the time I thought it was pretty cool.

From there I moved to an even weirder and more minimal site. This one was also a fun one, the site was a slow presentation of myself. I remember being into slow websites back then.

For a few months I had this guy right here as my personal site. I thought it was a fun idea to list friends on my site in addition to the usual informations.

And we’re back on the light side. This is when I switched to Maison Neue as my personal font. The font is awesome, especially on small sizes. I really like this one because it was simple yet unique. IMO it had the right amount of informations and by the overall tone you could get a sense of what type of person I was (am?).

The blog is coming

But on new year’s eve, I realized I wanted something more that a simple one page website and that’s why I coded a weird mix of a blog and a personal site. It was the first time I used a CMS for my personal site because up until this point, all my sites has been simple html websites.

So I coded that, kept it online for a month I think and then said to myself “What the hell I’m doing here? I don’t want to keep writing” and went back to a super minimal site.

It was a list. Couple of projects, books and a few other things. That’s it. It lasted I think a week only to then being quickly replaced by a very similar version of the same layout.

Visually was very similar but I re-integrated static pages for blog posts because I had a few things I wanted to write. And it’s at this point that I realized I needed and I wanted a blog and that’s what I coded next.

From this point on, the site is pretty much what you’re seeing right now. I started with a sans serif version because everything was sans serif on the web at the time..