I have been greatly enriched by various blogs and the writings of others. Blogs, at their best, are short essays about something someone cares deeply about and at their worst, just some rambling scribbles that someone cares deeply about. Either way you get some stuff. Plus you get the curation and thematic consistency lacking in things like reddit.
So why this? Clearly there're already good blogs out there, why clutter the space? Well I'm self-deluded enough to where I think people will care about what I write.
* However, I'm not so self-deluded to think that I would enjoy just putting ramblings out on a blogging service. So to alleviate that and make this worth my while, I'm building my own thing
†. And then I'm gonna use that experience as a topic. fucking revolutionary, i know. Move over Gutenberg. Do you think he printed a journal of how he made the printing press, on the printing press? Did he print instructions on how to make the press via the press? I got distracted and tried to find the first item he printed was and,
rumor has it, his "hello world" was the apocalyptic part of the poem
The Sibyl's Prophecy.
Anyways, a blog is what I set out to make, so immediately I made a ts/react app that dynamically loaded json files that contained posts. Which was cool but had a couple problems, formatting and discoverability.
Formatting: I wanted to have at least minimal formatting cause uh i like _nice_ things and hyperlinks. So went with what I know,
markdown-it, which didn't play well with react so then I went to
react-markdown-it and then, realizing that I was importing a lot of libraries. Also that storing formatting in a json string wasn't very readable to me (and at the end of the day that's what I want, stuff that is nice for me), so I paused and thought about other problems.
Discoverability: I've been dealing with OpenGraph a lot lately, for home projects and for work. For those not in the knows, OpenGraph are little tags you embed in webpages that provide consumers with enough information to build out a page preview.
‡. Most services can't run javascript and therefore can't support dynamically set og tags. To solve this you either need Sever Side Rendering or static content, which kind of made the dynamically loading a no-go. At this point I paused to look at some of the blogs I liked
§ to get some inspiration. And I ran into a feature I knew I had to have: an RSS feed.
To avoid getting long
¶ winded here I'll skip talking about how much I love RSS for now. Anyways I knew I needed to serve content in multiple formats: RSS and web site. Now if I wasn't poor/cheap, I'd shell out for a server to handle the data transforms. However I am poor/cheap so I'm going to precompile the posts and generate a feed out of them. "Going to" being the operative words