Hello World!

This is my first foray into blogging on my own platform that I manage myself! Here I'll explore interesting topics and tech.

I'm still working on building this blog.

This site is created with Gatsby. Posts and pages are generated from Markdown using a plugin called gatsby-plugin-mdx, which is just one of many available in the feature-rich gatsby plugin ecosystem. I'm learning as I go, with every new feature I add.

I could have just set-up a WordPress site for ease but I wanted to explore new tech and break new shiny things — symptoms of Shiny Object Syndrome

I have a long journey ahead.

For now, there's no pagination, keyword search, tags, categories, SEO optimization, or even custom <title> tags. This site is a big work in progress and instead of waiting for a finished, perfect blog site (never going to happen), I'm just sending this out to the world and hoping for the best.

I believe in the kindness and generosity of the open-source community. This codebase is open for issues, pull requests, and constructive criticism.

I'm proud of how far I've come.

Blogging has always been a goal for me. This site barely existed a few weeks ago, now I have something I fully developed, debugged, and designed myself. I tried to model the site design after my main website.

Tailwind CSS is an amazing tool that increased my productivity. I barely need to write my own CSS styles. All the custom styles I've written from my main website, I easily copy-pasted into this site.

I'm also pretty happy with how this subdomain (https://blog.neilitalia.dev/) is built with Gatsby/React, while my apex domain (https://neilitalia.dev/) is built with Vue.js. I didn't have the knowledge on making something like this weeks ago. Netlify makes it so easy!

But wait, how did I get here?

This site is borne from VirtualCoffee's monthly challenge for November 2021 where the awesome community wrote 50k words together! I didn't contribute to this, unfortunately.

It's January 2021 2022 as of writing and instead of giving up on my goal of starting a blog, I thought I'd pursue it despite the timing. Better late than never, right?

Where do I go from here?

My ultimate goal is to keep this site alive and add more features as I see fit. I've been wanting to start a long-term pet project and a blog seems to be a great idea for it.

I would add a Back to Top button here if it existed, I guess I'll have to make one. I would also plug my social media links here. I really need to make a <Footer/> component.

For now, here's my main site, my GitHub, my LinkedIn, and my email!

Thanks for reading!