A new and renewed focus and direction for this blog
Where it all started
Medium was my go-to blogging platform: online content editor, platform for boosting viewership, minimal setup, and more. However, it always felt heavy, I just wanted my content to shine, not anything else. It came with a lot of fluff that I didn't want to distract me nor my millions of readers.
I wrote mostly career oriented articles or story based articles, which I'll still continue to do, but I want to pivot more to deep technical articles. For what it's worth, Medium did probably serve me well for the time I was on it, but change is good and I'm done with it! 🚀
Where we are now, and where we are headed
There was definitely a bit of a learning curve for Statamic (how do I pronounce this?), and I'm still not sure I'm doing it all perfect in terms of "best practices". It's pretty sweet though. I have a PHP blog, that is NOT running Wordpress, but rather my favorite framework Laravel. I can do the simple blog posts and also dive deep to get integrations and plugins that I need.
Why not just a static site generator in markdown?
Great question! I think that is an option and I did consider plenty of those in my research, but having the power and comfort of PHP under the hood (let alone Laravel) was really one of the biggest selling points. It truly feels like a "developer's CMS" where I can define constants in the admin panel, reference that in code, just as you'd expect, and things just... work! Powerful but simple. Flexible and extensible.
Right now I'm a bit in the honeymoon phase where everything is new, fresh, and shiny. I am also running a small site here, so complexity is at an all time low. I'm hoping this is the one and only blogging platform/site I use for the next ~5 years (if not more). 🙏
Fantastic syntax highlighting for future posts
I have been following Aaron Francis on Twitter for some time and he came up with a fantastic (now free) service called Torchlight that enables VSCode level syntax highlighting across a ton of languages with plenty of themes. There are already several JS libraries that allow you to syntax highlight your code snippets but this one is the most accurate, which developers will truly be thankful for.
I integrated it from Duncan's post (found via Google search) and it only took 10 mins to set up and test. Pretty stoked to have it all working in a short time with beautiful code formatting!!
1readonly class FirstBlogPost { 2 public function __construct($content) {} 3 4 public function celebrate() { 5 echo "YAAY" . PHP_EOL; 6 echo $this->content; 7 } 8} 9 10$post = new FirstBlogPost("The new era of this blog is HERE!");11$post->celebrate();1YAAY2The new era of this blog is HERE!I have a few notes on technical challenges I ran into recently across a few projects, so now that I have my blog set up and running, it's time to create quality content. Check back soon to learn some new tips and tricks 😎