About the Site

2023-06-28 2023-06-29 2023-10-24 3 min

I decided to create a personal website for myself in June 2023. I suppose I want(ed) some kind of digital record of my development. I previously had a website (under the same domain) back in my university years. Back then I was more of a hobbyist. Wasn't as interested in the site as I was interested in doing stuff. Now, I'll try to pay more attention to it.

I wasn't sure what to use for the site. I don't want to waste more time than necessary to get it up and running, so I was thinking of using an off-the-shelf solution. I'm most familiar with WordPress. I thought I'd give it a try, but dropped it later. I'll need customizations, front-end and back-end changes, etc. It's too much pain to do these with WordPress.

So I took the longer road and decided to do it from scratch. Normally, this would take long, but I decided to fight against my perfectionism and keep this simple. Minimal UI, static views, etc. What's tricky is the tools that I'm using: Laravel, Tailwind, Vite. While I'm somewhat familiar with Laravel, I'm completely new to Tailwind, Vite, and bundling. I suppose it's safe to say that the site itself is another challenge for me.

I put together a simple roadmap to get things off the ground:

In the long run, I'm planning to turn this into a simple CMS. I think.

Ready or not

2023-06-29 2023-06-29 2023-08-06

Being impatient, I decided to go live with the incomplete version of the site. Filling the missing content is going to take some time, and I don't know, I don't want to wait. This should also raise the stakes and force me to not procastinate. I hope.

Since I began to edit this page as things come to mind, I had to modify the file format and the parser. Now, a single file can contain sub-pages. For example, this section is one.

Rewriting the parser

2023-08-06 2023-08-06

I recently came across the term "front matter" being used to refer to the metadata in static content files. I saw these metadatas here and there, but didn't know that they had a name, or wasn't aware of it (come on, everything has a name). Anyway, I did some digging, and it seems it's not that a recent thing. After this awareness, I felt compelled to rewrite my custom parser. The first version was a little ... sloppy. Trying to get things done quick does that.

Works

2023-10-24 2023-10-24

Since I just enabled the "Experiments" and the "Tools" pages (although with no content), I thought I should explain what they represent.

"Works" are things that I've built, but grouped under these three categories.

Projects: Projects are usually work related and somewhat large undertakings. They usually solve multiple problems.
Experiments: Experiments are usually fun, learning, and/or test related. They especially feed my curiosity.
Tools: Tools are relatively small, single-purpose undertakings. They usually solve a single problem.

Dark Mode

2023-11-06 2023-11-06

I've been doing some refactoring lately, so there isn't much change in the UI. One thing that is new, though, is the dark theme/mode.

While this is my first attempt at dark mode, I built a small HTML Application back in 2013, and it had dark mode support. So, I suppose, technically, this is my second attempt. I'll talk about that app in due time.

While I usually use the light mode, I must admit, I missed using and working with the dark mode.

Oh, another thing, I started using markdown. It's really practical for posts and alike. I also have a tool idea that utilizes markdown, so the practice will help.