This is a new post that I am typing all by myself, with my own little hands.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Just a test
It should be noted that this is just a test. As it is my very first post, please be gentle with it.
Now I am adding more text to this post. The question is if I can firstly check it in, and if that in turn will trigger Netlify to pull the file down and recompile the site. I did manage to move my DNS handling over to Netlify, that was simple enough. Now I am well over my comfort zone though.
As I have tested things I ran in to a couple of problems, with the most severe one being none of the blog posts actually had any content. As the files themselves indeed have content I figured it was either an include issue and/or a routing issue. It turned out to be the latter.
However, identifying what the problem is, is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as fixing it. Anyone who has known me in my professional life know that I have a couple of strengths…but also that advanced javascript isn’t one of them.
3 hours later I had managed to solve it, and it now all seems to be working again. I haven’t really figured out how to make a link. Oh, I had. It didn’t work in the other file, but I see now that it isn’t a markdown file, but instead an .astro-file, which I guess means it doesn’t get parsed as Markdown because…well, why should it? :)
Today I worked out how to check, and update, all the various node, or actually npm, packages and dependencies. That is a good thing.
Progress
So these last couple of days I have been fiddling around with a lot of stuff here. I’m happy to say I’ve made quite a bit of progress, both learning things that works really well, but also learnt a couple of things that doesn’t work, at all. That is still progress though.
I have succeeded in adding an automated “updated” date to the posts where I add updates (such as this one). I have failed miserably in adding a “Reading Time” function to the blog posts. That is mostly because the instructions for it are based on a previous version of both Astro as well as this theme, but also quite probably because I don’t know how to improvise and where to swap a “oh, so that was done there, in a file I no longer have, but it should possibly go in here instead” kind of thinking, as I simply haven’t learnt how it all fits together.
More importantly, I’ve had quite a lot of fun, regardless.
One of the things that has surprised me a little is that I seem to prefer using nvim for all my editing. I mean, I’ve always been a VIM dude, and I constantly ensure that all my servers have a good set-up of (n)vim on there for the event that I need to edit things, but as other software such as VSCode has become so good I’ve mostly ended up using them when doing code. Not so this time around.
Just having a terminal window (with multiple tabs) where I can control/view git, another tab for running the dev server and a third tab for nvim just suits me fine right now. A lot quicker. I don’t have to switch back-and-forth between various apps and/or windows. Also, my nvim config is in a really nice state, stolen with pride from one of my friends some years ago, and it has developed organically from there, so I “know it” by now…though I admittedly often have to open it up to verify a “how did I do that thing now again?” but still, I know I have it in there somewhere. :)
Auto-deploy
Another thing that has worked really well is working in git branches for various things and then to merge it in to the main branch when I’ve tested it properly. That in turn triggers Netlify which pulls it all in to their service and automatically builds it, which it ends in a publish.
Having stood by the sidelines for a while services like Netlify, Vercel, CloudCannon and Glitch as popped up and grown in popularity. Me, not natively being a javascript dude (I still think the optimal web sites split things to let the servers do what they do best, and then leave the front-end to do what it does best) and all these javascript based Static Site Generators (SSG’s) have sort of looked nice, but haven’t been able to compete really with my old set-up, which basically was a static site with Markdown content, much like this one is, but powered by PHP to pull things together. Lightning fast, very dynamic, great separation of design, data and functionality and, most importantly, really easy to update and add new content to. I could just whip up my phone, or any editor with an internet connection and add folders/files to publish a new article, which would auto-deploy to my VPS server with PHP/nginx (and lately, Caddy).
These last couple of years though, the CMS framework I was using, Grav, was being run on slow pace, by one guy, doing at most 20 h/week on it. Combined with Oracle Cloud, where I have a couple of sites, behaving really strange for a cloud service I decided it was time to look around and these new generation of solutions, if nothing else to challenge myself a bit.