When I was a teen, I learned how to build WordPress themes. During holidays or when school was out, I vividly remember how I sometimes sat in front of my computer for a few days and nights, and created new themes for my blog. Of course I had no blog, but having one was a cool thought. But this stuck to me, and I was really never happy with how my blogs work. Until now!
Read moreIn my last post I covered my decision to use GitHub Discussions as CMS for my posts. I’m going to build it using Next.js, because that’s what I already use a lot, and it has some features which will become quite useful. Let’s get cracking!
Read moreIn his blog post Take Care of Your Blog, Robin Rendle wrote some career advice:
Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning […]
Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm.
That’s exactly the philosophy I want to follow here. And that’s also the reason why I focused on building a blog which allows me to publish content as frictionless as possible.1
Chris’ blog inspired me to finally start blogging again. His blog is a mixture of smaller and larger development topics, mixed with other thoughts and stories from his life. Sometimes I messaged him with some small development thoughts or things I learned that day, and he often responded with “that would be a nice little blog post”.
And he’s right! You just need to overcome the thoughts “that’s not worthy of publishing” and “nobody cares”. At least I had to overcome them.
I felt like posting random stuff sometimes. Not only babble about software development tips. So I added this new Offtopic section. Although I called it Stream in the Sidebar because Offtopic is a long word?
Anyways, what started with a new category ended in a switch from Markdown to MDX and a dark mode, mainly because I’m often looking at my blog at night and it hurt me poor eyes. I’m not completely done, there are a few things I’d like to add and improve, but shipping is good.
I imagined some cool aurora borealis vibes going on, but didn’t yet spent too much time in Figma to make it a bit more like I imagined. I need to change some pictures of previous posts to fit into the dark theme. And some old posts were moved into the Offtopic section because it made more sense. In summary: things happened.
I’ve motivated myself to write shorter posts more frequently! The previous list of headlines (which is now the Archive) added too much friction for writing down some content—not just because I had to come up with a title, but also because a short post on its own page felt a bit … lonely.
After 2 years of writing posts in GitHub Discussions, I’ve now switched to Keystatic. The writing experience is much better: it’s still in my browser, and the media handling is much better! Images and videos became a bit more cumbersome with GitHub Discussions. It wasn’t impossible, just a bit annoying. And that extra friction became an excuse to not writing down some thoughts I had.
I might have been just a wee bit too excited to release this new version. There are some minor tweaks here and there to improve, but pfft, that’s continuous deployment for you!
