I’m not much of a blogger. I’ve tried this once or twice before, at least twice, probably more times than that.

My most recent attempt was a Gatsby site. The index/landing/portfolio page and ux/ui were built with React and Bootstrap. There was a contact page with a form and re-captcha. There was a blog index page and a blog post layout…without many actual blog posts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. What that site actually had, at least originally, was links to working example projects for portfolio work. That site was hosted on Gatsby Cloud, with the example projects hosted on Heroku and linked as subdomains. Both the Heroku apps and Gatsby Cloud site were set up for auto deploy from GitHub repos, and everything started out nice and simple.

Well… First I redid the ux/ui and never finished the last component for the portfolio page. Then Heroku free tier ended, so the project apps no longer worked and I never got around to redeploying them somewhere else… That left the site with a bunch of dead links to projects that only had screenshots and I wound up removing the unfinished portfolio section altogether. Then about a year later I got a notification that the Gatsby Cloud service was ending, which turned my landing and contact pages into a 404 type page saying the site was gone (although it looks like Gatsby Cloud is back, or Vercel made a new version).

So, I decided to rebuild the same site but with some slightly different tech. This time I used the AstroJS blog template, added tailwind, and I rebuilt the same landing page from the old Gatsby site. It’s a similar devOps pipeline for the site: GitHub -> deploys to Netlify -> GoDaddy Domain. I’ll also try to set up some working example projects here soon, once I figure out the best free tier service options for each app.

Anyway, since I’ve never been very good at blogging, I’ll probably import the whopping two blog posts from my old Gatsby site and maybe I’ll do some technical documentation and guides for how I built this new portfolio and blog site as a way to build some content here and stay up to date on markdown syntax. Seriously though, no spellcheck in markdown?!!?! I guess blog people write in Google docs and then copy/paste it over? This is probably why I don’t write blog posts often, too complicated, maybe I’ll do some research and set up an integration workflow for publishing these articles. Although, as I write that I’m opening a tab to search for automations and it looks like a workflow may already exist to save in Google Docs as an .mdx file straight to a GitHub repo. I’ll have to look into that, maybe it can be a future blog post.