Published on May 28, 2024 at 5:41 PM

My First Post!

Hi everyone! Or, well, myself and maybe two other people. This is my first official blog post to this little "portfolio" site I made for myself. It's also a test of how well formatted the PortableText component is, as Sanity studio doesn't give me much leeway on text formatting/alignment. This post is gonna be relatively short, so I'll just explain a few quick things.

#1 - Why did I make a website?

As I've explained on the home page, and a little bit above, this is supposed to be my portfolio site. I've made countless small projects that are collecting dust in my GitHub, so a website is my way of making them a bit more public. It also gives me a bit more motivation to pursue bigger projects, as communicating my work gives it a bit more personal value (a bit of monetary value too, given I'm paying $13/year for this domain!). My hope is to be relatively active with this site, regardless of whether other people view it or not. Think of it as a personal progress journal that's also public if anyone else wishes to view it.

#2 - How did I make this site?

I used next.js to build the frontend. Next.js was relatively new to me, but it was quite easy to learn and enjoyable to work with. It made routing and navigation between different pages seamless and simple to implement, something that's a bit more difficult with pure React.

I used Sanity.io as the content management system for these blog posts. I've used Sanity before while working on a small project a few years ago, but quite a lot has changed since then, so it took some time to configure this blog. While it was a difficult to use initially, it's certainly a nice (and free) way to store my blog content and automatically render it vs. hard-coding each post into my site.

I used Netlify to both host this site and purchase the domain name. No complains here, really. Deploying this site was as simple as linking its GitHub repository and clicking "deploy."

#3 - What are my next plans?

I'm not that sure, really. I've listed some general ideas on the home page, but I haven't had the "spark" of motivation to commit myself to any of them just yet. I've been spending more and more time with C++, so my next project will likely involve that in some capacity. Until then, I'll try polishing up whatever needs improvement on this website. The CSS isn't the most modern, but I wanted it to have a bit of a "home-baked" feel to it.

Until next time.🚀