Creating a Blog: A Developer's Journal

Hello, Reader! 👋

Welcome to my blog! I’m Apinant, a software developer. I’ve been working as a developer for about 2 years now, I’m passionate about learning new things and sharing my knowledge with others. I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while now, and I finally decided to do it. I’m excited to share my journey with you.

Challenges and Considerations Journal

Frontend

Why did I choose Astro? When I first started thinking about blogging, static site generators (SSGs) appeared to be a good choice. At the time, my options were Astro and Hugo. I chose Astro because I wanted to build from scratch, and Astro had just released version 2.0, which seemed perfect for my blog. It had features like Hybrid Rendering and Content Collections that I found appealing. However, during my development process, the Qwik framework released version 1.0, which I was really eager to try out. But I decided to stick to finishing this project rather than starting a new one. Maybe I’ll explore Qwik in the future.

I managed to implement lazy loading, though I’m not entirely sure if I did it the right way. If you inspect my blog on the home page, you’ll notice that it loads with zero JavaScript. But when you click on the theme button at the top right, it will download JavaScript to prepare for your interaction. Isn’t that cool?!

Recently, I came across a blog built using Hugo and a pre-built theme(PaperMod). It looked really good, which made me realize that building a blog from scratch requires implementing a lot of things compared to using Hugo. But in the end, what matters is that I’m having fun along the way, right?!🤔

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)

Alright, frontend design isn’t my strongest suit. Tailwind, with its class-based approach, seems a no-brainer to me as it eliminates the need to handwrite styles for each tag. Flowbite is next on my list - considering my lack of natural artistic ability, I need some guidelines, and Flowbite appears to be a fantastic option. As for Tailwindcss Typography, it’s an essential aspect of styling my markdown text, and it seems to be a quick and easy solution (as far as I can tell).

Overall, this CSS stack should get me started. Of course, there’s always room for future restyling (maybe).🫠

Commenting Engine

There are numerous options available for commenting engines, including giscus, utterances, remark42, and disqus. You might have guessed already that I’ve chosen remark42, but let’s first discuss why I didn’t opt for the others.

Both giscus and utterances use GitHub as their backend, which doesn’t align with my preference for having full control over my data. Disqus is a popular choice, but it’s a closed-source solution, which I’d rather avoid. So, that leaves me with remark42. It’s an open-source option and packed with features. The tricky part is modifying the UI to match my blog’s theme.

One challenge with remark42 is that I need to host it myself and setting up an SMTP server to send emails. After investigating how to set up an SMTP server on my server using docker-mailserver, it seemed a bit overwhelming at this stage. Thus, I’ve decided to use Amazon SES for now.

Newsletter

Since I’m already using Amazon SES for remark42, I decided to use it for my newsletter as well. I’m using Listmonk to manage my newsletter. It’s a self-hosted, open-source, and free newsletter and mailing list manager. It’s easy to set up and use, and it has a beautiful UI. I’m also using Turnstile to prevent bots from subscribing to my newsletter. and of course, I’m using Partytown to lazy load Listmonk’s JavaScript and CSS.

Backend

Actually, I have written a backend for this blog before, and I got burned out due to the complexity of the project that I tried to implement. The backend project not only intended to serve this blog but also to serve as my note-taking app automatically update the blog when I update my notes. It was a great idea, but I didn’t have enough time to implement it. So, fist rule of thumb, don’t get burned out!

At the end of the day

When I started this project, I didn’t think it would be this complex or require so many integrations. I guess I’ve been working on the frontend side in my comfort zone for too long , as my workplace hasn’t allowed me to try anything new.

This experience has been fun and enjoyable, reminding me of why I wanted to be a developer in the first place. It has reignited my passion for lifelong learning and trying new things. I’m looking forward to the next challenge! 🚀

If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you! 👋