Starting from scratch
I haven’t kept a blog since the early days of the web when I used Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress. I miss having an corner of the internet to call my own that’s not tied to social media ecosystems and all the baggage that comes with them. It will be nice to remember how to write something that’s longer than a tweet.
As a software engineer who’s currently looking for work I have an extra incentive to build a simple content-driven website from scratch. Astro seems to be one of the most popular options out there right now and I’m impressed with their docs, particularly their well-written “Build a blog” tutorial.
Behind-the-scenes, the blogging experience is merely a folder of Markdown files that I maintain with a text editor. The VSCode extension Front Matter CMS might be a way to manage some of that.
Progress on the website will be slow as I become more familiar with Astro and web services like Cloudinary for hosting photos.
So with that in mind, here goes nothing!