scostadavid.dev

New blog layout (again)

The agile process of being slow

Even if my first written post dates to January 2025, this website has existed for about 4 and something years. Not with this stack, content, or even domain. My first attempt at a personal website was around 2014 with a games Blogspot where I wrote small first impressions about games I played on my Intel Celeron or saw on YouTube (too poor for an Xbox 360, sorry).

You can imagine the quality of the writing, peak literature written by a 13-year-old with some pre-sleep disturbance, almost a match for the Godfather script... but it was something. At some moment I discovered people reading my posts and others looking for download links for cracked versions of the games. It was cool.

Some years later I built the first version of this website, using some Gatsby JS to showcase simple projects I made, as that was the site’s purpose for a long time. Even with this simple goal I updated the layout 100 times. I got hooked on personal portfolio reviews on YouTube, each iteration of my website being some pixels bigger or smaller than the previous one.

New fonts, new colors, white and dark theme, emojis, remove the emojis now this is AI slop, years. All the combinations, and suddenly the idea popped.

How about writing some blogs?

To me blogging was dead before this random thought. I was too focused on YouTube content and tiny bits of Reddit. I could not be more wrong. Discovering the indie web gave me some fresh tech air with RSS feeds and esoteric designs. I had to build something.

You know. I'm something of a dev myself

The first attempt was a mess. Trying to integrate a CMS with my Gatsby code was boring, the deploy on GitHub was weird, and eventually I gave up for a Next.js version. Prettier, complex, CMS, posts in two languages, and... posts in two languages? Why?

Norman Osburn from Spidemarn saying: You know. I'm something of a developer myself
You know. I'm something of a dev myself

Being a Portuguese native speaker I never had the guts to decide in what language I would write my blogs.

  1. My network is built of Portuguese speakers
  2. My English is not the most pretty I ever saw

So I tried writing the same posts in both languages. The CMS had good support for that, my brain doesn’t. It was hard, it was double work, it was boring, and that took the joy out of blogging for a while.

Wait... why am I writing posts in two langs if I barely have 5 readers and they all speak English?

I dropped my technical post Pandora box and took some time to reflect on what I really want.

  1. A more personal space and not a bad project showcase
  2. Improve my English

So I hit the hammer, dropping the CMS and implementing Markdown support for my Next.js website... and as expected I got tired of React.

React is a great tool, but it was a bazooka and I just needed a slingshot, and searching on Reddit I found 11ty, a static site generator like Hugo and Jekyll with a pre-made blog template with the three features I needed at that moment:

  1. Being simple
  2. Being simple
  3. Being... you understood

The Markdown support was amazing. With almost zero code changes I ported all my Next.js posts to 11ty and with a deploy on Cloudflare’s infra I had my happy blog.

THE END... no.

The neighbour's grass is always greener

My blog was straightforward like I wanted but it was not mine. The content was, the code was not. I needed to update, and I did countless iterations over the poor 11ty codebase. I can’t deny, some updates I did just because it was fun to experiment and see the results. Even not blogging too much, the blog itself provided me fun and all these iterations bring us to the new version V300millions.2

This new version is a mix of my boring minimalism preferences with the urge to build something out of my comfort zone, it’s not perfect but I think I can keep this layout for a while.