How I Built This

Wed, 13 May 2020 10:18:00 +0000

Obligatory musings about the state of blogging technology

When deciding to make a new site, I had to face the eternal question of “Do I reach for something I know how to use and does the job well or try the new hotness?”.

The new hotness, in this case, is GatsbyJS.

Gatsby has some pretty interesting ideas, and to be honest, took me a while to understand. The main gist of it is that you write a React.js application, and the Gatsby tool will take that, and at compile-time, run that application, and spit out a static site.

This is cool, because the React.js application that you define could pull data from a variety of data sources, but you incur the cost of pulling data from those sources at compile-time, rather than when users are using the application. These data sources could be literally anything, CMS data, markdown files, some external API.

All that said, for what I’m trying to accomplish with this site, this doesn’t really buy me anything. With either trusty old Jekyll, which I used for squidarth.com, or Gatsby, I’d be writing my posts in markdown files. I don’t have any other data sources I care about. It’s possible that using React templating is nicer than the Jekyll templating, but frankly, I don’t plan on editing the templates very often (I will hopefully spend most of my time in this project writing posts!).

So all that to say, I decided to opt for Jekyll this time around, with the Kasper theme.

Ugh, now I feel old.

Why not a CMS?

The thing that I definitely miss by writing posts in Markdown and using these static-site generators is the ability to get edits. The options are basically– write your post in a Google doc, get edits, and then copy it into Markdown, or make Github pull requests and have people comment. The latter option just isn’t the right tool for the job, and the former is clunky.

I know some CMS tools support this better. However, I want the flexibility to embed code in these posts and more do what I want, which is harder to do with CMSs.

A New Blog!

Tue, 12 May 2020 10:18:00 +0000

Hello!

I decided in the depths of my quarantine boredom to start writing more! While I love squidarth.com and have enjoyed writing blog posts there the last couple years, I’ve been treating it as a professional space. I’m hoping to use this new site as a less professional, more ad-hoc, and hopefully more fun space.

I’m hoping to use this as a space to publish my half-baked thoughts and ideas. While most of the content here is going to be programming-related, I also plan on sharing thoughts on other things, as well as what I’ve been reading/watching/playing. I definitely plan on continuing to update squidarth.com, and there are certainly posts here that will evolve into posts on squidarth.com. The goal here is that while posts on squidarth.com will continue to be topic-oriented, there will be posts in here that are just titled with the day’s date. Maybe one day I’ll consolidate them. Who knows.

Hope you enjoy it!