January 7th 2018

Houston, we have a blog!

blog, vue.js

One of my goals with this new year has been to start writing more frequently, be it technical articles or just my thoughts and ramblings. I've considered Medium in the past (and still might duplicate some of my writing there), but felt the platform just isn't quite there yet for the purpose of writing technical articles. I have read many well-written technical articles there that I felt were held back by the limitations of the platform. I'm of the strong opinion that learning is doing, and limiting educational writing to text and graphics isn't the best medium for doing.

With new years comes new resolutions.

So... after much struggle and some consistent head to desk interactions I have successfully added blog functionality to my static website! Since each of my articles on this website are Single File Vue Components, the mingling of text and technical code examples should be a seamless experience. Also, since this website is hosted on Github Pages, readers have a way to provide easy feedback and hopefully updates to my more-than-likely buggy demonstrations. I like my code to be open source, so why not my articles?

I still have some things on my wish list to hopefully make my writing and these articles as productive as possible, so hopefully I'll get to these soon:

  • Add a comments section at the end of each article (most likely with Disqus)
  • Add sharing capabilties, RSS functionality, maybe a newsletter (where Medium shines)
  • Add a search feature
  • Update the blog index page to be a little more robust. Currently it's loading the pages using the preval babel plugin which, as cool as it is, seems to behave a bit flakey at times and also have some issues with caching when I'm doing dev work. Also those little blog previews don't currently allow for nice things such as displaying vue components since I'm being naughty with the v-html attribute. Updated this to use a custom webpack loader to generate the index pages, although I'm still being naughty with v-html.

This site has already proven to be a valuable learning experience as I've developed it. Hopefully, with a few articles under its belt and some new features, it can prove to be a valuable learning resource for others as well!