New blog platform and layout

There has been a long radio silence since November. I have been extremely busy and haven’t found the time to write or even come up with topics to write about. On december I hustled a lot between may day job and Player Fan updates. In 2020 I have been super busy with my day job and haven’t really had that much time for my coding projects.

Finally I managed to find the time to get my blog updated. A year ago when I was getting started, I was still didn’t know practically anything about web development and technologies. I knew html syntax and some css. I wanted to start writing quickly, so I just signed up on Bluehost with a good discount and built a 1-click Wordpress server. It couldn’t get any easier than that.

However, as I learned more about web development technologies, I noticed that I don’t really need a heavy duty CMS in the backend. After all I just want to be able to write some articles quickly with code highlighting and publish them on a website. I don’t need comments, shopping carts or anything like that. Just simple blog posts and thats all.

I chose Gatsby as my new blog engine, because it super easy and super fast. Right now I am just typing in a markdown file in VSCode. When I push the markdown file to GitHub, the blog post automatically appears on my website. Once the system is up and running there really isn’t any easier ways to blog.

Another huge advantage is that, as I can write my blog posts directly in VSCode, the code formatting works perfectly as in any other file. Copying and pasteing code from VSCode to the Wordpress dashboard was always risky and I always had to double check all code blocks. Now I don’t have to do it anymore. If some code gets out-of-format when I paste it in a markdown file, the prettier plugin will reformat it perfectly upon the next save.

I am very satisfied with my new blogging platform and I hope to be able to start writing more frequently again. Not once a week as I did at the beginnig, but once a month could be a good pace for me.