To be honest, this was an idea of mine since the first year of college but I never had the guts to pursue my little dream. Besides that, every single time when I could start it I was like "Nah, there is no time for this, I have more important things to do right now". Well, that sucked! This thought is a dream killer and I don't know about you, but it killed a few of mine.

What changed, you may ask

Hmm, a few months ago when the pandemic was declared, I moved back home because it was a safer place than Cluj-Napoca which is one of the biggest cities in Romania. In the comfort of my home, I managed to work on my good habits and one of them was "Build that God damn blog and write some posts".

But where to start?

One will say with the beginning but in a vast landscape of web technologies and opportunities, I felt helpless. Thanks to the Github Student Pack I managed to get a free domain from Namecheap and my adventure was set. I also decided to host my website on Github Pages and use Cloudflare for security, DDoS and caching solutions, also they offer a free SSL certificate which will make any website HTTPS instantly.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

What I didn't know right away is that the most difficult decision is to choose a well-suited technology for my needs. There are thousands of ways of creating a blog. From the titans like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to new and fast solutions like Jekyll, Hugo, and Gatsby. I have some experience with WordPress, but I can't say it is one of my favorites, and besides that, I want a fast and reliable technology. I played with Jekyll for a few hours and I was amazed how simple it can be and how fast I managed to create some pages. With a few markdowns, some templates, and a touch of Jekyll sorcery the website looks great. But something wasn't right. I have to get a bit dirty to feel that I'm learning something new.

Later I heard about Gatsby from a friend of mine who managed to create a personal website from scratch. React is my first love when it comes to front-end libraries and luckily it is the foundation of Gatsby. I was impressed by Gatsby's features which include multiple CMS integrations like CosmicJS, Netlify, nice Image processors that will make any image web-optimized, lazy-loading, the power of React, build to static content, well suited for SEO, shall I continue?

Let's get the job done! 

I cloned a Gatsby starter blog that is integrated with CosmicJS CMS, I did some small configurations and with a few commands, my website was exposed locally. Yes! It works smoothly, it's fast and I'm comfortable enough with React to make it my own. I created some buckets in CosmicJS and some posts and with the help of GraphQL, I was able to use that data on my website. I installed Gatsby-Image plugin which helped me to optimize all the images from the website, I installed Helmet which is great for SEO and Styled Components to make it look awesome.

It's all about Design

I'm an experienced designer with some nice additions to my portfolio, but I never felt this lack of inspiration. It's harder than I thought to design something for myself, way harder than all the projects I had. I tried a few ideas but they felt too corporate-like, I need something with a touch of creativity, something that says "This is me".

Photo by Med Badr  Chemmaoui on Unsplash

With a spike of creativity and self-control, I was able to think outside the box which led to a bold, modern UI that felt mine! For the logo I decided the use a handwritten font that gives a nice touch of personality and a square shape that says I'm serious, I can be trusted and I will get the job done. The curved font is there to emphasize my creativity and the fact that sometimes I'm a bit messy and not too organized.

What's next?

From now on I will focus on the content and maybe I will write 2 posts per month. Another thing I'm going to do is to install Hotjar for UI improvements. Hotjar can offer very interesting insights about the behavior of users on the platform and I can run the AB tests easily. Later I will use Google Analytics to see who is my audience and how to improve my posts.

That's all folks!

It was a nice adventure and I learned a few things. Later I used this knowledge in a project for work and I did a great job! Stay around if you like my content and I'll be here with new stuff every two weeks.

Hero photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash