Over the years, I’ve written many personal logs on various topics to give myself a refresher should I ever want to explore further. I often speak on these topics with friends/family and when I do they always give the same advice “You should start a blog”. I usually like to keep my internet footprint pretty small, but I’ve decided to come out of my shell and start sharing some of the things that I’ve learned with a wider audience. I’ve made no commitments to frequency or quantity, when I find something cool I’ll just write about it.
To get things started I’ll talk about the simple and useful utilities that I’m using to make this happen.
I discovered Astro from the JS Party podcast. The creators were being interviewed and I enjoyed listening to their reasoning for creating the framework. There are other similar tools out there1 but I’ve decided on Astro simply because I think that it’s neat. If I hadn’t heard of it, however I’d have gone with Hugo.
For people like me who like things to look basic and uniform, Simple.css is an excellent choice. It has a nice, clean, default look and styles the html tags directly (with a few classes here and there). Not having to worry about formatting is something that I value in my workflow2 and it takes much of the tedium from the writing process.
There are a ton of choices to pick from when it comes to hosting a website. In my case, I just needed a bare-bones “serve this directory” hosting solution that I could plug into CI. Currently what you’re reading is on Github Pages, but I mentioned the others to make the point that this is an extremely simple and easily migrated solution. Heck, I could even just spin up an nginx container and serve the file themselves (there are more steps than that, but hopefully you get the point).
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, tools necessary for writing a blog is having a good editor.
I know that for many a “proper” word processor is critical, but for me, it’s just good’ol (neo)vim.
I’m partial to this mostly because I live in the terminal3, and I can move very fast with vim’s powerful keybindings.
Of course, to ensure that I’m not making a complete fool of myself I use tools like ltex-ls which uses Language Tool to check grammar and spelling.
Ultimately I’m hoping that a few of the things that I write in this blog are useful for others, but if not it’s useful to me 🤷.