It all started of wanting a way to document my development process on the things I’m working on as well as to store my artwork in a new gallery since my old one is pretty lack luster. At the same time I noticed many developers that I know of have blogs where they talk about stuff and seeing how fluid their words were when talking about a topic made me notice I really struggled to do the same due to my lack of practice of the art and often find myself being at the tip of my tongue. “So why not a blog site?” I asked myself, It seems it solves all the my current needs and an option to add more features to boot so I began researching and developing.

Researching

One of my main research material was on neo cities. One thing I loved about neo city websites were that they were made for the purpose of projecting the artistic values of the author and it really shows. The sites are pretty unhinged as if you time travelled to the early 2000’s with the skeuomorphic design their components uses. “Then why didn’t you just make a neo city website?” you may ask? Well that’s because I was too lazy to learn the in’s and out’s of neo city on how to deploy my site to their domain. I have also noticed that some of the people in Neo Cities aren’t even programmers yet they learned all the css and html cemantics and even a little bit of javascript just to make their own personal space and that is pretty respectable.

The Challenges

Finding my own theme was hard. Finding the right fonts and colors actually took more time than building the layouts and components. I wanted this blog to be simple yet it should reflect the author’s personality and aesthetic choices. I was on a constant cycle of looking at inspirations and asking myself “Do I want that” and the answers were typically “I’m not sure” so one thing I’ve learned from this is that being decisive about the changes is paramount so things can move. “Just put stuff out there, I can make it better later”, I said to myself.

So decided to make it a Noir themed with a news paper aesthetic since I’ve been addicted to playing Deadlock for the past month kek. I really like the how Deadlock’s aesthetic looks with it’s skewed shapes and grain filters it has so I incoporated it to my design choices as well.

Muh Techstack

It’s just astro… I could’ve gone with something more simpler like plain ol’ vanilla javascript but I like how astro has a template for blog sites and that’s enough for now. I also have more experience with this framework and I just love it gives the option to give static site generation. And the CLI is pretty cute as well so that’s fun.

Actually Writing A Blog

Putting your thoughts into words is actually hard without it being more stale the further you write—made me wish I focused more on my english classes kek. Worries aside I have a bit of experience from journaling, although my journal entries are more akin to unfiltered rage and delusional thoughts than an actual legible entry.

When making this entry—remembering what to say, how you felt, and the best way to say it is a juggling act I kept balancing i.e I’m bad at this but like any other art form this takes time and the more I practice, the more I get comfortable being uncomfortable. This is but a first step of many.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
— some chinese proverb

Deploying

I used github pages for now since I don’t the have the finances to buy my own domain. Outside of that, undergoing the deployment was new even for the likes of me since it’s my first time tinkering with github actions to automatically rebuild the website on new entries or changes in the site. It was delight to learn new technologies again and hopefully I would do more of these in the future.

Overall

I had a lot of fun when making this blog, the challenges it provided as well as the inspirations I got to add in my overall philosophy. Hopefully In the future, I hope I can see that I have made dozens of entries—each being a step towards improvement.

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