As you can see... I redid my website! And I actually made it this time, not just set up a hugo theme! Wow!
I want to actually use the blog section too. I like writing stuff like this, and now I have a good place to put it. Not sure what I'll write about, but I'll figure it out. And what better way to get started than to write about the fact that I redid my website, and what I used!
The old website
The old website was a hugo theme coder that I set up and configured and such. Setting it up was kinda fun and interesting at the time but now it's just crusty and not a good representation of what I can do. I'm by no means good at making websites, but I can do more than write a config file.
That's it. Moving on.
This new website
This here new website is made with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript. I've messed with Next.js a bit before but never made a static site with it. I've also used Tailwind CSS before, but not too much. It's a pain but at least it's easier than CSS? And TypeScript. Ah TypeScript. Telling me how I've screwed up my code before I even save it.
Everything on this site is themed with the Dracula color scheme. I have everything I can on my laptop using these colors & themes, so it just makes sense to have it on my website too. Now that's an idea for a future post...
Blog posts
My previous site had (not very many) posts written in Markdown, and writing stuff in Markdown is something I've always loved. I can just write, adding little annotations where I need. But with MDX I can include components right in it! You wouldn't get this if I just used Markdown...
The posts also have a similar comments section from the old site, but better. White I previously used utterances, a comments system based off GitHub issues, this new site uses giscus. It's essentially the same thing, but it uses discussions, which adds replies to comments, reactions, and a couple other things. It's also a lot more customizable, which is nice.
Analytics
For analytics I'm using plausible this time, instead of goatcounter. I admittedly haven't been able to try it out very much, but it looks like it's a lot better than goatcounter. It's still "privacy-friendly", as they put it, and has some cool stats. Here's some pretty sad realtime analytics from plausible:
Other trinkets
On the home page I use lanyard, a cool little API that exposes my Discord status.
"Conclusion"
And I think that's it... I really like how it turned out! If you're interested in further stuff about this, it's open-source on GitHub, go check it out. If you have feedback (of any kind) on this site or this post, please comment!
p.s. if anyone knows a good vscode spell checker that works for mdx files please let me know