A New Blog Beginning
Oh Yeah
I had a simple portfolio webpage I made in book camp and labored many dozens of hours over. After boot camp I stripped it down a little and took out the references to the simple coding projects I'd done, assuming I'd update it at some point with better project references.
The next iteration saw a new background image, some colored containers for the text, social media icons and the removal of a coder's book list once I noticed everyone had such a list. In the age of LinkedIn and other sites used by developers, it wasn't clear why I needed a custom web page, but I liked the novelty of it and that it wasn't part of some official platform.
Oh No
During a work break in late 2020 I wanted to redo the page again but realized I should integrate a blog. From there I went down the Jamstack rabbit hole. That was actually super fun and I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly book. A benefit, of choosing, say, a Netlify template is that you can easily throw together a decent-looking site and be done. I played around with a few different templates but admittedly the layouts were new to me and I wasn't sure it was worth all the trouble. I decided to go with the simplest iteration, the eleventy-netlify-boilerplate that had a contact form and also allowed blog editing via Netlify CMS. I thought this might have the best usability and longevity.
OK
So far it seems good. I've learned how it works though I sometimes still edit in the wrong places. There's nothing worse than an empty blog and this one has been staring at me in an accusatory fashion for months now. After making some rudimentary edits today I decided to make a new blog post to mark the occasion and get started. I hope to continue making a post a week or so, to document knowledge and share with others. I plan on first publishing work on this site and then re-posting to Medium.