Hello world, finally here!
This personal blog idea has been in works since before the dark times, before the Empi.. ahem! The title says it all. Finally here, hopefully will continue to maintain this blog for I am in need of typing out what I spend my time on usually. This is a blog primarily keeping some notes for myself. I hope what I will publish here would be of use to others in the future.
I have been trying to come up with an easy to use and cool-looking blog that combines some effort on my part to keep up with the changes in web development technologies. I remember seeing this one very interesting blog by a web designer/developer when I was first dipping my toes into what seemed like a lake, but in fact was an ocean of unknown depths called programming. It was truly astonishing at the peak of JavaScript's "nah bro Imma work different in each browser, ok?" era. Here, I pause for a brief history bit.
I studied HTML, CSS, JavaScript on my own during an internship back in the day from w3 schools sources so I did not have anyone with a modern digital design knowledge and/or experience to show me out-of-the-box trends. It was all basic stuff. It did not have much to it. Just tables, and some div magic for beginners. Infinitely nested tables if you get bored. Pretty late 90s.
However, this one guy who is behind the blog I mentioned earlier blew my mind one day. He had these things that I had never seen before on a web development tutorial. It was.. really looking good. I began to read his blog immediately.
He had a lot of ideas in his blog that made it look like a desktop environment rather than a flat and vertical web page like this one. Divs rendering remotely produced content, AJAX calls flyting all over the place, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
The rest is why I could not put this blog together for all those years, LOL.
As years passed, I have gradually started leaning towards simplicty and function as we are now an Internet society -at least for the large parts of the developed world. I cannot think of day for the past 20 years in which I had not referred to some source on the Internet for information. We need information fast. We do not have time to deal with ads, bad design, pop-ups, this and that.. Simplicty has become a luxury.
I thought about going all-in with a full CMS style blog built on an MVC-style framework. The idea was to practice building fully functional production-like systems. It was a cycle of starting with an idea, putting something together at a very basic level, finding something new out and halting all progress in favor of transitioning to the new thing.. Obviously, it did not work so here we are..
(Reads "Here we are," in a villainous voice)
I finally settled on Ghost. I tried Hugo before. I found it had too much to learn just for putting a blog together. Markdown static pages? Nope, it's been in graveyard for months now. Ghost seems to be pretty much what I needed for a simple but rich blog experience -both for the author and readers.