This website started as a quick little side project. A way to display other projects while I'm working on the dream website backend I've envisioned somewhere in a text document.
The reason for this is that I noticed I was using the lack of a place to put my projects or make them available to others as something I made as a excuse from working on my other projects. After all what fun is it to make a tool, that doesn't get used.
So I started working on this website. I decided that the pages should be written in Markdown, because I like it. Reason enough for a personal website, no?
After I got that system figured out, the biggest trick to figure out was actually routing. For now I'm defining paths through regex but, I'm not really enjoying that because regex is hard to read and I hate it. So I'm thinking of writing my own simplified pattern matching system, specialised for routing my own website, adding whatever feature becomes a requirement and refactoring it into something neater if it turns bloated.
It is not everyday that the idea of making a system to write blogs in enters your head.
But I was already making my websites using .md files to generate the webpages and dynamically generating a list of posts didn't seem that hard so I thought, hey... Why not?
So here I am writing a blogging system from scratch for fun.
Anyway. I got a small list of features I want to add still, considering right now it is very basic. Most of them are going to be quite easy to make I think.
After all, generating a table of contents from headers shouldn't be too difficult, neither should adding dates to the posts list, adding tags or filters be difficult to add.
No the 2 things I'm still thinking about alot are actually. For one what the best way of making a search function would be. (Though this would have to be added when it starts making sense (too many posts)) and for two what would be the most readable way of styling both the list of posts and the posts them selves, without sacrificing the chill asthetic of my website.
Another thing on my mind during the development of this website, is my consistency... Or lack there off. Not in how much I work on it, that doesn't really matter. I'm treating it as a for fun hobby project. No the real thing I'm having trouble with is that I'm being consistently inconsistent in what language I'm writing in, some pages are in English, some in Dutch.
Here's a fun overview:
| Page | language |
|---|---|
| Error 404 | English |
| Error 500 | English |
| Home page | Dutch |
| About page | Dutch |
| This blog post | English |
| Previous blog post | Dutch |
I'm currently debating whether I should have a technological fix that auto detects the language and translates the pages between two options or if I should just really get my act together. The latter sounds more reasonable. But the former more useful?
Actually there's a third option where I just make all pages in both languages manually, which could be interesting but that might get tedious quickly...
I'm currently still working on the website's layout and style.
Stylistically I think I know what I want. I want something clean, pretty and with a giant picture of both space and the earth in the background. Because I like that.
For the website's layout however, that's a bit more interesting of a question. I really like the way the site looks. But on desktop I've noticed that pages with larger sentences like this one, just get... Tooo horizontal. So I might wan to look into that. I'll write about it in a next post if I did. Theoretically it shouldn't be that hard. But, I just don't want to add arbitrary width restrictions because I think it looks bad either... Still very much something I'm still debating
While writing this website isn't that big of a challenge technologically, it is very much a fun activity for me and in a way. Since its been so long since I seriously developed a website, nostalgic of simpler times. I think the last time I genuinely made a half way decent website was.... 2010? I mean I made one in 2016 but that one was attempting to look like a google app without understanding what made that look and feel and I never quite liked the end result, especially since the code for it was.... Bad and inflexible. And querried a MySQL server for multiple times for most pages... Yeah I'm glad I don't do that anymore. This website isn't connected to a SQL server at all actually. yay.