Having Fun Creating a Blog
Ayden Diel, Aug 18, 2024
A few months ago, I got into the habit of reading hackernews articles for at least a few hours every week.
I’ve read an embarrassing number of articles and github readmes during this time, my personal favorite being ”start all of your commands with a comma”, which I now do religiously. Eventually, after reading enough articles and seeing people’s home-cooked tech blogs, I started thinking about how I would make my own blog.
Will people even read it?
What JavaScript framework should I use? (svelte)
How would I store/write my static content?
These questions made me realize that it would actually be really fun to build out a blog the way that I wanted it built, and write about what I wanted to write about, I can design the site how I wanted it to look, etc. The opportunities to overengineer a website that just serves static markdown seemed endless, so I jumped in.
How I Did It
If you’re just wondering about the libraries that I used, here you go:
- SvelteKit & static adapter for Svelte w/ routing and static site generation
- MDsveX for statically rendering markdown as SvelteKit routes
- Neat CSS for some basic CSS boilerplate (found this on HN!)
Additional shoutout to some internal OpenAI training site that I got access to when I worked for Scale, which I scraped a bunch of the code for the cursor spotlight effect from haha
What I Plan to Do With It
Other than the posts being tech related, I’m not sure what I’ll post exactly. Some examples of things that I’d probably have posted about if I had the blog set up at the time are learning Vim, teaching myself touch-typing, and how I got my foot in the door of freelancing.
Basically I’d be writing about what I know, and what I know is beginner/intermediate level programming and career stuff. My long-term goal, however, is to build my blogging skills alongside my coding skill so that by the time I get to the really interesting computer science stuff that I want to do, I’ll be able to blog about it and share my thoughts easily!