Hello World

This isn't the first post I've written with "Hello World" as the title but hopefully this'll be the last. The point of this initial post is to go through the journey of how the site ended up the way it did and how my requirements/skills changed as time went on. Rather then breaking it down into this intro and an in depth post I'll just put headers to break it up so feel free to skip to '' to get the current version.

WYSIWYG Era

Originally I wanted a site purely as a basic blog that I could use for things like game reviews, chapters from books I'm writing, and other misc posts related to said writing. So since I wanted to do something with a little effort as possible I first went down the WordPress route like a lot of other people I know had. Putting aside a long running theme of never coming up with something to actually post, other factors caused me to move on. On of the major ones being picking a theme since I wasn't going to make one myself. The other part was being overly worried about security and a bit of choice paralysis for what plugins might be useful. Worth noting at this point I was doing a course at university for programming, which while not web specific I don't think it would have been beyond my skills to figure out.

So the next idea after just not having a site for awhile was Wix, one of the handful of well-known WYSIWYG tools online. If you don't know Wix is similar to SquareSpace where you can use templates and edit the site visually. It's a bit different to WordPress in it's a bit more dynamic for alterations since things like text boxes, images, and such can be dragged around and resized. Again most of the issues I had weren't shortcomings of the platform itself but similar to WordPress in choosing an appearance. Plus as time went on with no posts actually being written I had started a job doing Web Development which meant I decided to make something to compliment what I did at work.

.NET Era

Without going into too much detail about my job it did meant I got to know some new skills. It involved making mostly web forms using .NET Framework in the C# programming language. Also with some side stuff like SQL and such but I didn't want to use a database for a blog to keep costs to a potential minimum. So to begin with I used the same N-Tier approach to make my personal site. This went through two versions as I improved using the Framework. The first approach would have caused me to need to make each blog post individually and link to it. Not a big problem but I like to write in MD files and converting it over was a pain. Then I got it JSON based, so like now a blog post would have an id and simply pull the content from the JSON file. This made images a bit more difficult and I couldn't use code blocks if I ever wanted to.

I then swapped for a short while to using something more modern so I first went to Blazor. I managed to get it working in localhost reading from MD files with ID's. This was a stepup from the JSON idea and using a Nuget package I managed to have it convert nicely into HTML. But when I eventually got it working to a degree on a hosting platform it didn't display properly. Not being daunted by a challenge I elected to challenge myself to swap to something else.

Jamstack Era AKA the Present

Jamstack is something learned about on YouTube and decided quickly it seemed like something I could use for my blog. To begin with I wanted something where I'd just make blog posts and maybe some pages for my writing. So to begin with I looked at Jekyll which is made using Ruby which I had never touched. I didn't stay on it long though as I work I got to work on some small projects using React, and there got to know TypeScript. So that lead to me looking for and finding a new Jamstack solution which came in teh form of Next JS. I did see others like Docusaurus, but since that seemed more suited for documentation sites(what were the odds of that?) rather then a personal blog I didn't use it much.

Originally I wanted to build a Next site from scratch(or rather the starter template so the blog/Tailwind/etc). This went not as well as I'd have liked, mostly due to not being skilled at CSS. Imagine the 'Graphic Design is my passion' image here. So I found a nice template which is what the site is now based off. For details as to what makes up the site now and how it's ran, look here.