This is the start of my awesome and amazing blog! /sarcasm
As part of a front-end course at my university, I was tasked to create a project built using front-end technologies. At the time, I wasn't sure what I wanted to make, so I settled to create this portfolio website.
However, I didn't want to make a simple single page portfolio, that was something I could do in like a day if you just gave me React and TailwindCSS.
So I decided that this portfolio website would also host blog posts.
I had put a lot of thought into what I wanted for a blog, here were my requirements designing my blog content management system:
I wanted to write my blog posts in markdown to simplify things, so I opted to use ReactMarkdown.
It lets me use markdown syntax to do things such as displaying code:
console.log("hello world");
Or display tables:
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
| Header | Title |
| Paragraph | Text |
This way, I don't have to build out HTML/JSX components to write simple blog posts like this whenever I want to create a simple text post.
Markdown is cool and all, but really useful for just documentation, articles, text posts with no interactivity.
So I decided that I wanted to incorperate javascript elements as well. This gives me the freedom to do things like this:
...while still allowing me to write most of the blog post in markdown.
What kind of blog doesn't allow comments? So I had to decide how to implement comments, I settled for a couple of ideas:
At the time of building this site, I wanted the whole site to be statically-generated and did not want to write a backend nor host one. I also did not want to use a third-party package/library/service to hold all my data (comments). Ultimately, I had to compromise (because I was lazy) and used a third-party.
However, this wasn't a terrible idea compared to my initial plan, which was to use GitHub issues as a way to store user comments and statically generate them on the deployment of GitHub Pages. I could have then used a GitHub workflow to redeploy/update the comments anytime there were new comments.
Utteranc.es does something similar, in that it uses GitHub issues for comments. So I decided on using this to save me time and my sanity building something like that from scratch.
I didn't really want a blog... I'm not really the best with words and have trouble with expressing my thoughts through words, especially to others.
But I will try my best at documenting my life, interests, and whatnot here when I feel like I'm in the mood to write blog posts.
Thanks for reading this terrible mess of a blog post. Bet there's not even a dozen readers of this post 🙄.