68: Blogs Are Back

It's the year of the blog. And Linux on the desktop. lol. We talk about some of the more simple pleasures of building a website for personal blogging, getting into the CSS and actual HTML tags, not just generated webpack bundles. And yeah, at certain times we get old timey for RSS readers and irc.

Year of Content 30 Days In

Should have been called the year things I don’t feel I am good at.

Like CSS Devops CI/CD Pipeline

Things I’ve learned in making my blog actually readable

SEO is a lot more complicated than I give it credit for. meta tags for days. All I wanted was that nice card when I posted a url to my blog. React Helmet adds a bunch of those metadata elements to your page for you. Get it? like a helmet. Here’s the worst part. I’ve been using Helmet. A lot. Like for years. I use it at work. And guess what, I had no idea really why. It was just a thing you do for site mapping, or HTML data or something. 🤦🏼‍♂️ So after a couple Tries, figured that out. Turns out HTML/CSS is still pretty powerful. I am pretty sure years ago when I started writing react I proudly proclaimed that “I was a web developer that never had to write an dot HTML file by hand!” Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s experience. I know peers my age, with more experience that I have, and that’s not quite it. Maybe it’s kids. More concisely a life event that forces you to refocus on a daily, nah, hourly basis. People are counting on you. Tiny little people that cover the spectrum of emotions. CSS. Feels like it’s the lawless land of overrides. I thought this when I was almost about to put a !important in my scss, for the only reason I couldn’t figure out how to override this property. Using Bulma.

Bulma is a free, open source CSS framework based on Flexbox and used by more than 100,000developers.

I think I came across it in a combination of Gatsby starters, and saw that Scott Moss used it, and I was like, if it’s good enough for Scott I should totally be using this. He has done a ton of Node classes on Frontend Master’s. You need to check him out, seriously. (link in the show notes)

So I wanted a dark like theme. Think Daringfireball. If you aren’t familiar with him, he’s a blogger? Hence the theme, back to blogging.

Signal vs Noise brings their blog from Medium back inhouse.

problems with centralizing the internet

And that’s a real problem lately. There was a dare I say robust blogging community a decade ago. I myself had 5 or so abandon blogs with such snappy names as

digitalwhale technode and others. lol

But if they weren’t all in one easy convenient location, how did you read them grandpa Jesse? Gather around the fire kids, it’s called RSS. Yes the very same publishing xml feed that brings you my podcast to your favorite podcast player, could collect a bunch of these “feeds” into one app on your desktop and later your iphone to read, bookmark, and share (usually via email or irc) with your friends.

There are two mediums that remind me a lot of the old-school blogosphere: newsletters and podcasts

~Simon Owens

There are other good things about blogs.

Less spammy advertising. Having control of the content. Also in searching for content to support my thoughts, I got a lot of super spammy things with titles like “How to start a blog and make 10k a month”

This is all to say, 30 days in, and I’ve made 25 posts. I’m getting ideas for automation and quicker ways to get this out and share them auto magically. If you have a blog, send me the link, even if you post irregularly. I’d love to see what you’re up to.

Picks

Bulma CSS framework Scott Moss DaringFireball Signal V Noise Exits Medium

We should replace blogs with Personal Websites

Resources Follow

JavaScript to Elm

Twitter: @jstoelm
Email: [email protected]

Jesse Tomchak

Twitter: @jtomchak