Hello World (Again)
Here I am again, rebuilding the whole thing, enjoying React and static site generation and making plans to blog more often.
When I relaunched this website a little over 2 years ago, I was hoping to be posting here at least a couple of times a year. 😳 Meanwhile, I moved jobs a couple of times and even moved to a different country altogether, abandoning these plans in the process.
But, yes! the strategy and the ambitions did not expire. I do not want to go another 8 years without a site of my own.
Let's Fix It
I still believe that owning our content online is the way to go. Off with this broken model, enough social media and algorithms, and back to the basics, back to the true nature of the web.
As a consumer, I like to surf, read, subscribe to things, or simply stumble open them, bookmark them, save them for later. I enjoy following hashtags, following topics, not algorithms.
And as a creator, I want to live the freedom of dreaming up some stuff, experimenting, creating, sharing. Then breaking some shit, learning. Asking for help. Collaborating!
Check out this post by Matthias Ott about Why and How to go about Weaving our Web. He explains it much better - and more eloquently - than I ever could. #web #websites #letusfixit.
So What's Happening at andretorgal.com?
Started learning React more seriously some months ago and catching up on cool stuff such as PostCSS, CSS custom properties and browserslist.
I feel I was just stumbling upon - just like that :-) - a world of interesting possibilities.
That's when I decided to port my static website to React Static, and model this kind of old school website, that's pretty much coming up all modular and atomic-ish.
Feels like 2008 again (don't confuse with 1998). But unlike a decade ago, these days, the tools just seem to work, and provide you a great experience. And the browsers seem to be all Yes you can! whereas before, they'd be all like Oh no, you don't!.
Best of times, so far.
What's next?
There is a big backlog. It includes better navigation, blog rolls, footnotes, publishing my design system, continuous integration and so much more.
But staging is coming soon. Just ironing out some details with asset extraction and responsive images.
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