My homepage while a student, at https://n.ethz.ch/student/tisaak, initially was a link aggregator for various websites used daily by me and my classmates. It was fairly popular, but also hand-coded in HTML and CSS. This is what it looked like at the peak of its popularity!

As everyone’s academic trajectory gradually diverged and the set of links of common interest kept shrinking, I converted the website to a true old-school homepage. However, wanted a way to have nested paged and consistent layouts and theming, without having to do all the work manually.

To my knowledge, there were no static site generators like Hugo back then, so I learned the basics of the GNU M4 macro processor and implemented my own templating.

It looked something like this .