Why

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do more with my own tech knowledge and development stuffs. The main reason being I don’t really have much I can point to and say “Look I made this!” There’s Thirsty Sword Lesbot (a Discord bot for the ttrpg Thirsty Sword Lesbians) and some one off goofs on my Github that aren’t really all that impressive. Maybe I’ll freshen them up and make them things I’m proud to share, but that’s a later Lily problem.

After reading this blog by Xe Iaso (which has some very good stuff, read xer blog if you like techy stuff and/or other stuff) I got inspired to like, just do it. "It" meaning whip up a new portfolio/blog site using something I'm interested in learning, and write some bloggy content to put on said site. Meaning this is my first blog post, ever!

What

My main deal when it comes to programming languages is web stuff, meaning HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and within that, mainly using frameworks like React/Vue/Svelte to build things. I'm not making too big of a turn out of that realm, but definitely a different kind of framework, Remix.

As for where the posts and things come from, another tool I wanted to learn about working with is GraphQL. So, I want to use something to pull data from that uses it. Enter GraphCMS! They have a free level, a super good UI, and automatic GraphQL API to query your content from.

How

I'll have separate blog posts for my notes and ramblings while I developed and learned how Remix and GraphCMS do their thing.

The main purpose is going to be a portfolio site, to show off things I've done and want to have a space to share them. I'll have a blog section as well for posts like this one, and that'll pretty much be it aside from a home page and contact me page. The portfolio items and blog posts will be stored in GraphCMS, Remix will grab them and create the site when it loads. Essentially it'll be server-side rendered, so to any browser it'll just be a plain html page with any needed JavaScript hydrated after the initial render, through Remix magic, or even NO JAVASCRIPT! That's only if it's not needed, of course, if you want to do fancy React stuff it'll still need Javascript, but things that can just render out plain html and css don't need all that. Which also makes the website more accessible!