Hello, stranger.
I don’t know how you ended up here, maybe you were looking for Advent of Code solutions and stumbled upon this page, or maybe you opened this post on purpose because you’re interested. Either way, welcome to my blog!
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
The Past
I’ve been thinking about having a personal blog for a long time. I think it’s cool to have a place where you can share your thoughts and have 100% control over what you post. At the time I was a big fan of React and of course, Dan Abramov. When I saw that he’d created his own blog I’ve thought to myself: “Wow, I want that too”.
And I’ve made it using the same template as Dan. I’ve tweaked a few things and connected it to the Netlify for hosting.
I liked most of it and managed to write a few posts, but something was missing. It was too simple. And I’ve wanted more complex stuff like MDX and TypeScript instead of JavaScript and other stuff.
And around that time I’ve started to build a new version of my blog with fancy stuff like Next.js, Vercel, posts with MDX instead of plain Markdown and so on.
And I’ve got somewhat working stage, but there was a lot of work to be done.
I think that this project became too complex for a simple static blog, and that’s why I’ve stopped building it. And because I was little bit disappointed, I also stopped writing posts on my old blog.
The Present
The thought of having my own personal blog has never left me, so I have been researching about it from time to time. And recently I’ve discovered Astro for creating static websites and AstroPaper for blog template.
Something clicked in me and I started working on the new version of my blog using these technologies.
And this time, I’ve managed to build +/- optimal solution for me. And I think that if it suits me, then it is already a big step forward.
Here’s what I have at the moment:
- Customized AstroPaper template to suit my needs.
- Automatic deploy to
Cloudflare Pages. - Motivation to write new posts.
The Future
I plan to continue writing posts, I have several topics in mind. There are also some improvements I want to make to this blog:
- Use code-hike for syntax highlighting. Currently it doesn’t have Astro support, but there is a possibility that this will be fixed eventually.
- Tweak here and there, but nothing too serious.
- Maybe add some CMS, but I have some doubts about that.
- Continue writing about my solutions for the Advent of Code.
I hope everything goes according to plan. If it doesn’t, well, that’s life.