For as long as I can remember I wanted to write a blog, and not just write it, but WRITE it too. By that, I mean I wanted that blog to be on a site that I wrote.
It's not that I haven't tried, it's just that I never really got around to complete it. I've been too busy shining my skills as a master procrastintor.
But, all's well that ends well and I think I ended up with a pretty good setup, especially considering the minimal efforts I've put in setting it.
Well, it's up now and apart from sharing my over exceitement, I also wanted my first blog to be about how I got it all set up. It's quite a minimal setup can be done quickly and for anyone who like this setup and design I welcome you to fork this and start your own.
\ Hosting is pretty high up there in being one of the reasons why I procrastinated in setting up a website, I never researched enough and quickly bought one of those GoDaddy shared hosting for a little while, they expired quickly & renewing those subscription being a desi guy always felt like a trap.
So, when I saw a friend's blog hosted on Github, hype was real! free hosting forever and with a pretty good domain name, too good to pass. I found Github pages to be the best option for me to exercise this little "Hobby" of blogging.
Storing images on Github however seemed a bit unnecessary to me, so I chose Pinterest to do the image hosting, so all the images you see linked in this blog are comiing from Pinterest.
\ So, I got a new project at work and we chose to do it in with Angular, it wasn't the only reason for me to chose angular for this site, since I had wanted to learn at least one of these JavaScript frameworks, I even did some beginner work with React & Angular for a while in the past, but never quite got into it. So, with that project and my new experience with Angular it seemed like a pretty goot deal to setup this site with it to both get more knowledge on Angular along with getting the site up.
I used Angular 8 (latest version around the time I started this project), with a Bootstrap 4 for CSS along with moderate amount of customizations ofcourse.
Now, I know, it feels like being a little late to the party coming up with Angular + Bootstrap while all the cool kids are doing Vue and Material and stuff, but I quite liked how it turned out, and I kind of wanted to avoid sailing on two boats by chosing Angular at work and React at this side thing.
The last thing is this cool markdown parser for Angular called ngx-markdown, it does all the hardwork, I really love writing markdowns on Git and Confluence and that's why i chose this package, it does great job with loading .md files and rendering them as HTML, all I do is write my blogs in markdown and Voila! great stuff. It also provides syntax hightlighting for the embedded code blocks in markdowns with the help of Prism.js, which is definietely helpful as I certainly am going to need that in upcoming posts.
It's not all over yet, I'm thinking to add a Facebook's comments plugin along with some SEO meta tags management logic for these blogs in some time soon. That'll probably complete this.
Feeling good about this.