Blog
The blog isn't quite ready yet, but you can follow along as I build it.
How I'm building this blog
These days most people build their blogs in WordPress, or they use static site generators like Jekyll or Hugo or Astro. I started using WordPress in 2004, when it was brand-new; at that time, you had to tweak the PHP to even get it to use a static page for the front page. I have built many WordPress websites through the years, from 2004 all the way up to 2021, when I adopted all the new stuff and created it with Elementor and the new (at the time) Gutenberg editor. And now... I'm done with WordPress and the weird dude who runs it, and that's enough said about that.
Many people I like and admire use SSGs. Nearly all of them, in fact. I tried Jekyll and Gatsby and Astro, and I liked them all well enough; I liked Astro a lot. I even initially built this site in it, and planned to continue using it. But it still felt like overkill to me, and honestly, this is a hobby, and having to wade through so many tutorials to learn a different way of doing things I already knew how to do felt like a chore, and it wasn't fun.
And so...
I'm building my own CMS, just for this blog. It's just PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS. My tried-and-true tech stack.
What I've done so far
- On my local server, I've set up a MySQL database to hold my blog posts.
- I've got a main page (this one is just temporary) that's talking to the database, and I've got a list that reads the article titles for my "Recent Articles" section in the sidebar (it's commented out right now).
- I'm working on an admin panel; so far I can use it to create new blog posts and categories.
What's left to do
- Finish the admin panel so that I can use it to generate a new page from my template
- Refine the light/dark toggle
- Refactor my CSS, because it is A MESS
- Populate the sidebar
- Add comments (currently evaluating comment systems, because that is not something I want to build)
- Add the Share to Mastodon feature to my post template