Devspace 2.0
Welcome to the first post I am writing for the second iteration of my technical blog, Devspace. In this post, I want to provide some details about the site I am replacing and how I plan to use the new version.
A story of an old project Back in 2019, I worked on creating a personal blogging website, Devspace. My intention was to use that site to document things I learned during my career. The website, in my opinion, was pretty cool. It included a profile, in-app MD editing with real-time rendering, users, etc. For the sake of this version dying - I am going to post a photo dump of my previous work.
As you can tell, this website is serving as its replacement. The reasons are pretty simple: a $15.99 Heroku bill.
I realize that I could have simply changed where I am hosting this project, and I still might do that. However, I took this as an opportunity to start something new, and migrating a hobby project is not something I want to do in my free time.
What went wrong and how can it can be better? My largest problem with my first technical blogging effort is that it lacked the most important component: posts. Retrospectively, I think this is because of the complexity that was baked into the site. I ended up spending more time maintaining the website rather than using it, which once again, is not something I want to do in my free time.
So how can I make this better? I started the project intending to use it as a technical blog site. One of the issues that I found was that, though cool, the in-browser post editor was useless. I would always open a code editor, write my post in markdown, then post it into the form.
This got me thinking about the most important part of a blogging website, and specifically a technical blogging website: text editing.
For this reason, I am returning to a simpler time on the internet, where I am server rendering pages (with some new magic with Next.js and MDX 😉) to get my word out there. The implementation details of this site will be outlined in a later post.
Looking towards the future I plan to use this site to still post technical content, but I hope to make the tone more casual and entertaining to read. I am still working on fleshing out the functionality of this website, so bear with me. My end goal is to deliver the best possible, ad-free reading experience.
By Dan Morton dmorton2297 on 11/3/2023
A story of an old project Back in 2019, I worked on creating a personal blogging website, Devspace. My intention was to use that site to document things I learned during my career. The website, in my opinion, was pretty cool. It included a profile, in-app MD editing with real-time rendering, users, etc. For the sake of this version dying - I am going to post a photo dump of my previous work.
I realize that I could have simply changed where I am hosting this project, and I still might do that. However, I took this as an opportunity to start something new, and migrating a hobby project is not something I want to do in my free time.
What went wrong and how can it can be better? My largest problem with my first technical blogging effort is that it lacked the most important component: posts. Retrospectively, I think this is because of the complexity that was baked into the site. I ended up spending more time maintaining the website rather than using it, which once again, is not something I want to do in my free time.
So how can I make this better? I started the project intending to use it as a technical blog site. One of the issues that I found was that, though cool, the in-browser post editor was useless. I would always open a code editor, write my post in markdown, then post it into the form.
This got me thinking about the most important part of a blogging website, and specifically a technical blogging website: text editing.
For this reason, I am returning to a simpler time on the internet, where I am server rendering pages (with some new magic with Next.js and MDX 😉) to get my word out there. The implementation details of this site will be outlined in a later post.
Looking towards the future I plan to use this site to still post technical content, but I hope to make the tone more casual and entertaining to read. I am still working on fleshing out the functionality of this website, so bear with me. My end goal is to deliver the best possible, ad-free reading experience.
By Dan Morton dmorton2297 on 11/3/2023