A bit of history

Making a blog is simple, I should just build it from scratch.

And time proved these to be famous last words, as always the wall of procrastination proved to be so much higher than the wall of technical possibility (In other words I can do it, but I am lazy).

First try was during college days, it was vanilla JS/TS site with no framework. It was actually nice and I even created a page for me to write Markdown and see the rendered view in a split pane.

But nevertheless a university student had nothing to talk about at that time (maybe ranting about uni courses but I don’t think a lot of people wanted to hear abut that). and the project was abandoned.

Second try was with react as that was the first real web framework and learned. And just saying it’s in React is enough for me to not complete it (I really really don’t like React).

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So after These two attempts I decided I needed to stop reinventing the wheel and jut look for a nice static site generator.

Part 1 The engine

My first thought was this is the web, so let’s look in to a TS solution, no need to go to another language.

Personally I don’t like JS/TS that much, but it’s the language of the web and I know it well, so after a bit of search I found with two outstanding options Astro & Vite press. They both where very solid options with a good plugin ecosystem and overall look and feel that I liked.

But somehow Astro shined a bit more to my eyes, so I decided to choose it.

Part 2 Theming

I started looking into astro theme library, but when my eyes found a theme that said terminal inspired I just did this.

The setup was fairly straightforward, even the Giscus integration. As the description said, the thing was ready in 2 hours (which now makes me look at all the abandoned projects I have and think about restoring them, but that’s a plan for after Eid).

After some tweaks to the startup code by the theme (thankfully only in code not CSS). I can say this Blog is ready.

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