Welcome to my devlog! As a kid I spent a lot of time reading dev logs for various games I was excited for, and I always thought it'd be cool have one of my own.
I've chosen to host this myself, using the dumbest and simplest technology possible because I get really anal about customizing things and I don't want to spend time learning how to customize some framework, though I'm sure there are many great frameworks that would do all this a lot better than what I'm doing.
This means that this won't be searchable, or support comments, or anything fancy like that. Hopefully this isn't a big problem but we'll see! I've found over the years that I have a very hard time sticking to anything unless I enjoy the process, so this is my way of attempting to create a process I'll enjoy enough to stick to making semi regular posts.
I intend to write about whatever I'm currently working on here. It's mainly going to be an exercise for me to help solidify my thinking, but hopefully it will also occasionally be interesting to read!
To start things off and also test my posting workflow, I'll just talk about how I set this page up, which I did over the course of this afternoon/evening.
My whole website is written by hand in plain html/css. There's no frameworks or templates or anything like that. Those are great when you need fancy things but I don't think I really need them for my purposes and I enjoy the simplicity.
I used to host a blog on Medium, but after making 2 posts I kind of just gave up on it, the page didn't really feel like mine and I wasn't excited to add to it. My thought for this devlog was that maybe I could just write posts in plain markdown, convert them to html somehow, and write some css to style it to look nice.
I found some frameworks out there that do exactly that, but they have a ton of other features and it seemed kind of confusing so I ditched that idea and found an extension for my code editor (vscode), which converts markdown to html and copies the resulting html code to the clipboard.
It is exactly what I wanted, because it literally just copies plain html with zero styling, it doesn't even include the <html> and <body> tags, which is actually great because it makes it easy to paste the blog content directly into the post template.
The post template is just another plain html file with a <div> where the content goes. You can see all this if you view source on this page.
<div id="blog-content">
/* My blog content will go here! */
</div>
For now, when I want to make a new post, my process is going to be as follows:
blog/index.html with the current date.This is certainly something that could be automated with a script of some kind (oh no its becoming a framework!), but I'll cross that bridge when I get annoyed by this process. For now, this seems pretty easy enough!
One thing I like about this approach is the potential for every post to have unique html content in it, if I feel like. I could even include interactive stuff using javascript, which seems kinda cool. 🤓
Anyway, that's about the long and short of it. I'm looking forward to making some actual posts soon, though I think first I'll convert my sad 2 posts off of medium and onto here! If you read all this, I'll never know about it but I appreciate you!