Blog: The Second

So you may have noticed that my blog looks different. This isn't a mistake, I have totally rewritten the backend on top of Fresh, a framework for doing dynamic web shit with Deno.

Historically, JavaScript stuff and I have gone together like oil and water. NPM fights me. A lot. I have to hack and hack to get beyond a basic proof of concept. It's frankly exhausting. I have not had to fight Deno at all. Everything just works like you'd expect it to in other ecosystems. It's a thing of beauty.

One of the biggest advantages of this setup is that I now have cut out the slowest part of deploying my site: waiting for GitHub Actions to build all of the Haskell code involved with the old stack. A full deploy of the old blog took up to 15 minutes to have a moderately complicated Haskell program barf out about a megabyte of static HTML. This does work, but it's very inelegant.

The old static site also was awkward to style. I had a simple CSS file based on 100 Bytes of CSS to look great everywhere, but I'm very bad at styling websites, so this didn't really scale for me. The new blog uses twind, which allows me to use all the goodness of tailwind. I'm still figuring out how to style this, but I'm happy with what I have so far.

I'm gonna try out this new blog engine a bit. It's pretty nice and minimal, but so far I've noticed that I don't have RSS feed support yet. I'll get there though, probably will just have a JSONFeed this time around.

I hope I can continue with this. It's pretty cozy and nice.