Some things about how I made this blog
I haven’t really tried this whole blogging thing before, but I’ll give it a shot, at least it will probably be fun.
Like I said in the title, setting the whole this up took me about a week, probably because I would get around to working on it at 11pm. I’ve decided to use Zonelets for the blog for now.
I wanted to have some kind of framework(? I guess you can call it that) so that if I wanted to change how my blog looks later on (which is something I certainly will do) I wouldn’t have to do it in every single page.
I’m almost certain that I will eventually move to some sort of static-site generator, but it’ll be fine for now.
One thing I decided to change in the Zonelets script is how the posts' html files should be named. I didn't want them to have a title, just a date. I was mainly inspired by this article about link rot, how urls, ideadly, shouldn't change.
Sometimes people on the internet think that the theme doesn’t really matter and that you don’t really need to change it, that you can just stick with defaults, and while that may be the case, that’s boring. I love that you can change how everything looks, it’s one of my favorite things about webdev, even though it takes quite a bit of time to do.
When I was thinking about the styling for the blog pages, my mind just randomly came up with the retro installer look idea. To be honest, I thought it was way fancier than it actually was lol. It’s just a blue to black gradient with text at the top left. It took some time to find a property to stop the background from moving, but aside from that, coding the theme was pretty straightforward. I've tweaked the main text area a bit, but I didn't stray too far from how it was originally.
White looks kinda yellowish with this saturated blue background.
Also, if you're reading this from the phone, try flipping it horizontally. There will be a blog title at the top of the page, just like in the installer. It's pretty cool I think.
I’ve added these # symbols to headings so it would be easier to differentiate them. When I’m reading a large post and there are a lot of level 2 and 3 headings it can be hard to tell them apart at first glance. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter, but I would be pretty cool lol. And yes, it’s very much inspired by markdown, even though I’m writing this in LibreOffice (LibreOffice W). Speaking of.
I’m yet to figure out the optimal workflow for this. Right now I’m writing the text itself in LibreOffice, like I said, then I’ll convert it to HTML with Pandoc, and then make it work with what Zonelets expect manually in VS Code, maybe make some styling changes if needed or even add some text here and there. It would be nice to simplify this process, but again, this would probably require using SSG.
Do I think people would be interested in reading all of this (or any of the other post, assuming there will any)? I mean, Maybe. I like seeing what other people think and write, and… *intense thinking* I just like blogs, alright. Blogs are cool.
(fun fact I wrote most of this on Feb 1st and then I didn’t touch it for 5 days yay)
Also, I really need to brush up my punctuation lol.
Anyways, that’s probably a good time to wrap this one up.