Hello World

Hello world, I am Tales Miranda and this is my blog about my adventures as a programmer in this incredible tech world. I'm very curious about all things in tech and I like to explore and create things on my free time, so I created this place to keep track of all these interesting non-work tech stuff.

Why

The main reason I decided to create this, is the frustration I was having after having nothing to show up after expending time learning or toying with some tech. I tried to fight back this feeling by creating projects to apply whatever I was learning, but they either end up too trivial to be useful or too big to be finished. Either way, frustration again.

This blog is a different solution. Any language, library or framework that becomes an itch, I can scratch by writing about them here. Having the post published is something to show up for. The post acts as a constraint on the size and scope of the coding, if any. Hopefully this will help me to avoid Yak shaving so often (opens new window).

I also really wanted to write more, so I can practice my vocabulary, so this is a good excuse to do that.

How?

Ok, I'm motivated, so how de we start a (dev) blog in 2021? I could quickly create an wordpress or something, but I don't want to be tied to a platform in particular. Also everybody seems to be using static site generators and they are cool, so that route we go.

My first idea was obviously writing my own generator, but I could bravely resist it by remembering I actually already tried this once, so this time I went to search terms like "Top 10 hottest site generators 2021" and spent some time comparing them, and took a deep look into Jekyll (opens new window), Hugo (opens new window), Nuxt (opens new window) and VuePress (opens new window).

I decided to use Vue Press because it has a surprisingly good support to blogs out box and also because I have some experience with Vue so it is easier to me to customize it (Jekyll looked nicer on 1st point, but would be harder customize it). I just had to type yarn create vuepress devlog on command line and all boilerplate was graciously generated for me, including some example posts. I could serve it locally using yarn dev.

I needed to find a place to put the blog, and (github pages)[https://pages.github.com/] looked like the default choice, but this felt like creating something serious like a resume or portfolio, and I wanted freedom to be more like a testbed. I also have been wanting to use the Neocities (opens new window) for some time, so it was the perfect moment to go there and create https://justadevlog.neocities.org (opens new window).

What I actually done

Now I had work. First, back to VuePress, it was time to thing about its looks. The default theme is mostly good enough to go for now, but in order to feel like home, I had some minor adjustments to make:

1. Fill out the blog info instead of placeholders. Things like blog name, date, contact info.
2. Fixed the ugly summary font color, by explicitly overriding the css. Fix wasn't pretty either,
3. Created a placeholder for special "About" page and linked it on the top menu.
4. VuePress also has some niceties built in that are activated by just providing configuration properly, so I setup RSS (opens new window), Disqus comments (opens new window) and a sitemap (opens new window).

I wanted to have the Neocities banner, but editing the footer was too complicated, so I put it on the about. I also wanted some way to group posts by date, but I'll search a plugin for this when I have time. I'm not truly satisfied with the theme, so expect a future post about how I created/chose/customized one, but for now this will work. See, I'm really resisting the urge for the Yak, this is a good sign.

Finally we need the content. This exact post already serves as first post and I'll probably copy the first 3 or 4 paragraphs to the obligatory About page. I already have links for all contact info I was brave enough to share put on the footer and will be copied there for convenience. With this out of way, I just needed to run yarn build to generate the actual pages to upload.

Now I just had to quickly setup the Neocities cli and upload, so I have my blog and its first post online and I need only to tell absolutely no one ever about it 🙃. Ok, alright, I will tell people about it... eventually. (if you are reading this, it means already did)

Uhh, thanks and see you soon.