I mean I already had a website, but it was kinda old and also it was super bright, even I had to reduce the brightness on my device. Lol.
The other problem also was when I started my old website it was meant to be a simple portfolio website, but sometime after the build, I thought, it would be cool to have a blog of my own. So I found Hashnode, they have a pretty cool interface to write blogs. The problem now was, it looked disconnected from my primary portfolio website. I just let it be for the time being but always wanted to have a simple platform that served as a one-stop solution which did NOT look disconnected.
Last but not the least, I wanted to open-source my projects. Trust me, this is a very difficult thing for me to do. Mostly because I am (almost) a self-taught programmer without a mentor (maybe the instructors on youtube and Udemy were my virtual mentor?) and I am super scared to put things in public domain where people can judge me.
With all the above points in mind, I had to pick a tool (I mean, at this point, I mostly write on JS/TS), I had heard great things about headless cms, but that would also mean I had to put it up on some cloud provider and there still could be ambiguity about, "is it actually - I get, what I see ?", so dropped that idea, other popular tools like Hashnode, WordPress, etc also had to be discarded for similar reasons. That's when I taught of using markdown to write and parse to html. I am aware that this might not scale, but this is purely for me, and I am probably not gonna write thousands of blog in the next couple of years.
I saw this brilliant video from Sonny Sangha, on how easy it is to actually get started to build a website. I was like, you know what? if I am anyway going to make this open source, why not demonstrate how easy it is to get started in via a youtube video. The video below is used to build things from scratch.
Ofcourse, to figure out the blog side of the code, I found this course on Udemy by Brad Traversy. The entire source code is available within the course and the course itself is highly recommended. I mixed and matched for portfolio and blog, and Voila!. I have used different slider package, and adjusted styling for responsiveness, but that's about it.
The entire source code for this website can be found in my github here.
I plan to at least write one blog a week, I procrastinate a lot, so I am not sure if I will be able to keep up with it, but I promise to try. I also will try to use my websites github repo to build things. For example, I have not added any testing to the whole blog, and I will eventually and I want to document that out as an article. Will also make a blog about SEO, performance, and other relevant metrics. I mean the idea is to kinda show everyone who is starting out, how easy it is to actually get better with web development.
I am also planning to branch into mobile development and a couple of other super interesting projects this year, I'll promise to try and capture all of them in this blog.
Why is the grammar so bad? Generally, I proof-read most of the things I write, but this time I do want to keep it basic and not worry too much about grammar. Apologies, if this is something that antagonizes you, I am hoping that this exercise will also kind of help me to organize my thoughts better as I go. Here is a cheat sheet if anyone is interested in markdown Markdown Cheatsheet.