I found a thing!
Oct. 19th, 2023 09:57 amBefore I talk about the thing, a disclaimer: it's more like something I discovered or found out existed :-) And before I even get into that, I'll talk about some other things...
I think I am now fully recovered from whatever I had caught. My bicycle is back. It is finally repaired and I picked it up from the store last Saturday! Of course now that I have it back and feel good enough to go cycling again it became extra cold and is raining a lot every day -_- I hope there is one day during this week that is neither stormy nor rainy.
Yesterday I met my mom for a coffee. That was really nice. I proposed to go to a bakery with café near where my wife and I live and my mom really liked it there. We just talked until she was going to catch her train back around noon.
In other news: I succesfully graduated that further education course and got the results for my exam (the project with report). I got a beautiful 1,0 (that's an A) 🎉
Now I'll write about my finding:
This is a web framework. I came across it through some YouTube video(s) that I was watching. One of the professional coders whose videos I watch on YouTube had a blog and I figured out it was done in Astro - which I haven't heard about at that point. I also watched his video on why he moved his blog to Astro and why I (as the viewer) shouldn't. But after some research I decided to ignore that and do it anyway.
There is more than one reason why I really wanted to try the Astro framework. Number one reason is that I really wanted to build a blog since a while. But I don't like any of the blogging platforms around - even though I did actually set one up on wordpress.com that I haven't touched in a while. There used to be nice blogging platforms but nowadays (👵) there's nothing that strikes my fancy. That is actually how I came to use Dreamwidth. I figured out it existed and I liked what I saw and set up my journal here. Also, I stay here, I wasn't planning to ditch my journal here in favor of something else. Not saying never but that's not the plan.
So, before I came here I tried to build my own blog with Jekyll. I am not very experienced with Git and the terminal, so I followed a tutorial or tutorials in plural more like it. This experience was pretty frustrating. There was always something not working. Even if it went just fine in the tutorials and I followed them step by step, there was always something off. I mean, doesn't help that those tutorials were always at least one year old but the documentation was also not helping me much. I have to admit all of that was confusing to me. I tried for several days until I eventually gave up and set up this journal on Dreamwidth.
The frustration and disappointment of not having been able to set up a blog via static site generator never really left though. Then lately I've been thinking about that wordpress blog that is just gathering dust. Originally I had set it up to post about my coding journey. So that I would have a record of my learning progress that I can always go back to and reference. Funny enough I let it gather dust and ignored it during my further education course. I did take a bunch of notes though and wrote down what I learned.
Then I started building my portfolio, which means that I am learning a lot of new things in the process right now which unfortunately I left undocumented. So the thought of documenting it in a blog kept coming back to my mind. But I didn't want to get frustrated again either. So I looked for options, watched some videos and eventually stumbled upon Astro. I mean, it is space themed, how could I not be interested?
Supposedly it had a new, modernized approach to all this and seemed easier to set up. At least that's what I've read and when I watched one or two videos of people actually installing it, it seemed easy indeed. Like, it just ran and the little "setup-wizard" in the terminal looked easy to understand and even pretty. Can you imagine? Somebody took the time to make it look good. There were basic questions for the user to answer in order to set it up to one's needs (like, "are you going to use typescript?"). Next day I watched yet another video and couldn't resist it: I had to try to install Astro immediately! I put on a video tutorial this time too, but actually I could've done without it. In case of doubt, the Astro docs are really well done, but I figured that out to be true later on. I was amazed! Seriously. I followed instructions and everything that was supposed to happen, happened. It just worked and without a hassle my base website was there. Wow, so cool!
After that, yet another tutorial. This one actually takes three hours. Meaning, the video itself is 3 hours long but I spend much more time with it because, you know, pausing, trying things, researching things, changing something up to my own needs etc. So I am not even done with that tutorial yet. I do need it though, because there are several things I am not familiar with and this way I get it set up properly and on top of that I am learning. JavaScript too, which is one of my main goals to learn. Along the way there were a few minor problems though which I figured how good the Astro docs are. Oh yeah, also a thing that I really like: after I just installed my site, I noticed the readme file that came with the installation process and it actually gives you some basic commands like how to run the local host and stuff. For the newbie me that's something to appreciate.
Right now I am making good progress and I am in the part of the tutorial that I was most interested in from the start: blogposts in markdown and integrating them. Yesterday I managed, the basic stuff is working :-) I am looking forward to continue.
There are two open questions for me though:
- Which language do I blog in?
For my own understanding I might be better off with my native language which is German. But in English I would reach more people in case my coding diary could help others. - Hosting
At the moment I have no web host. I put all my portfolio projects up on GitHub pages so far. But when I do my blog which I possibly want to run together with the actual portfolio which I hope future employers will see, I find it not very elegant to have that mashed together with my projects on GitHub as just another repo. But on the other hand, I'm very short on money and not sure if I should put it into web hosting...
Well, these are things I will have to figure out eventually and also discuss with my wife. For now I just keep building that blog :-) Regarding the host I found rainbow-web which is the most affordable option I came across so far if I need webspace and a new domain. I don't know how good it is though and how trustworthy.
The three hour Astro tutorial is useful and I recommend it, by the way :-)