Over the past two years or so I think I have tried to rewrite my personal site about 3 or 4 times. Each time with the same goal of making a simple blogging platform that gets out of the way and just lets me focus on the writing.
Since I find myself with two weeks off of work and its the end of the year / beginning of the next year I figured I would go for another rewrite this time with the long term goal of doing the following:
- Get the bootstrapping work out of the way and focus on the writing
- Use this as an opportunity to test out personal projects like
native-bundlerandreroute - Be easy to setup and get running with simple additions as I go forward (i.e. scale out from an initial product)
Where to start?
A few months ago I was planning on kicking off this rewrite within the same repo and site that I have currently, I started by updating to emotion v10, swapping react-router for reach router and changing all my old content from markdown to mdx.
This was all too much work to do as part of a rewrite and I begin to question the benefit of doing such a task.
I decided the other day that it would be a lot simpler to just drop all the current infrastructure I had around my previous blog and just start fresh.
My hope is that without all the technical debt the previous site had, I could get this one into a decent spot without much work and focus on the writing.
So this new site is built using a node build script around 150 lines in total,
building off of the awesome work around the MDX language spec, babel,
prettier, and even eval!
What to do next
-
Port over some of the front pages from my current site
-
Make a build watch script
-
Deploy to now (see if I can deploy as a subdomain on matthamlin.me)