So welcome to version #382 (more or less) of my personal site, something I have rebuilt, relaunched, and rebranded an untold amount of times over the course of my life. This time I wanted to do something a little bit different.
Previously, I would immediately turn to my hosting provider, spin up a new WordPress instance, find a theme, and boom. New personal site. This time, however, I decided that I didn’t want to use WordPress at all for well… reasons.
My second immediate thoughts were to whip up a Laravel + Vue application and build out the site of my dreams. Something I’m very capable of doing, but I just wasn’t interested in building out all of the scaffolding of a Laravel app including all of the items like databases, redis, etc… that goes along with it. I also didn’t really want to have to choose a package to provide admin tools or worse… roll my own. Plus it just seemed like so much overkill for something I’m going to be interested in for 15 minutes and then let get dusty until I get another twitch in the eye and do this all over again.
I also briefly contemplated using a headless CMS to drive this, but again, kind of the same things with a Laravel app, it just felt like I was building a Lamborghini when all I really wanted was a Honda Civic.
What were my actual needs?
- Lightweight
- Customizable
- Easy to work on / extend
- Powered by markdown files
What did I end up choosing?
I decided to build this site with Astro, still following in my footsteps of finding a template that I could modify because I am no designer. After scouring the internet for about an hour, I finally settled on the one you’re seeing now… or well… I guess the one you’re seeing at the time of this writing because let’s face it. I might have changed themes already 🤣
Why Astro?
Well, it started with a project we had at work where we had to build a small site to fit various needs and the frontend engineer that was leading that project ultimately chose Astro. In seeing how he built that site and the tools leveraged there, it was something that kind of stuck in my head as a tool I might use one day.
Alright enough backstory, why build a site at all?
I’ve become really interested in centralizing my decentralized life (I know, I get it) and I’m looking for somewhere that will outlast the Facebooks or the Xitters or even the cool places of today like Mastodon. Somewhere that I could kind of “pull my life together” and offer a convenient space for all of it. Instead of coming up with a professional site, or a hobby blog, or anything else super niche, I decided to come up with a site dedicated to me and all of the pros and cons that come along with that.
What will I write about?
Well, if you’ve made it this far, 👋🏼 thanks for reading my ramblings. I’m not going to be limiting myself to any particular topics, but I’ll probably have a few things I write about consistently
- Software Engineering
- Management / Leadership
- Video Games
- Music
- Maybe some Sportsballs like the NFL, WWE, etc… but probably not a ton
I figure I won’t write too much about my veganism here because, let’s face it, I already have an established brand for that in the Vegan Voyagers and I can just write things over there.
Everything will be tagged appropriately so that you can figure out what’s available and what you’re interested in. I’m also going to look at building out separate RSS feeds for my major topics 🫡 but that’s a project for another day.