Dyslexic Diary: Now with my own domain
I rebuilt my blog: from scratch with Jekyll, Tailwind, Turbo Frame (from Hotwire Turbo package), and deployed it with Netlify. Later on, I plan to release a step-by-step guide or tutorial of what I did, maybe even offer a template with these tools properly configured under an open-source license.
Context and motivation
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about having my own domain with some kind of resume/portfolio. In mid-December 2020, I used Github Pages to set up a blog/diary, with no intention of promotion, just to force myself to have some organization and focus on what I was studying and developing.
As I wrote in my first post, I’ve always admired (in a good way) programming blogs, whether they feature extensive and valuable tutorials or even those with small yet valuable TIL (“Today I Learned”) articles. Now, I have my humble technological corner.
Development
I basically followed the
step-by-step guide
by Giorgi Mzrnsh, which involves creating a blank site
with Jekyll using the --blank flag and setting up
jekyll-postcss and Tailwind. This
wasn’t exactly trivial; I made several silly mistakes like changing folder structures and forgetting
to include them in the content key of the tailwind.config.js file, among others.
Another important credit I cannot fail to mention is to Max Chadwick who adapted the CSS themes for the syntax highlighter from the Pygments CSS project to meet the WCAG accessibility standard.
As I mentioned earlier, I intend to release a template with everything I did here. Until then, the code for this blog is available in this repository.
Next steps
After all the work I put into creating this layout, which is responsive, by the way, I still have some ambitions:
- Retire my old Github Pages, leaving only redirects from posts to here.
- Set up multi-language support to complement my English language studies and give it an “international” feel, since it’s also a portfolio;
- Add some JS functionalities like smooth scroll for internal post links, sidebar menu, etc. Maybe I’ll use the Hotwire package and utilize Stimulus;
- Implement the dark mode option, which Tailwind already covers.
- Keep writing here, of course.
For now, that’s it.
