A new blog for 2024(chrisnicholas.dev) |
A new blog for 2024(chrisnicholas.dev) |
There are some moments when you shouldn't use WordPress. A blog is not one of those moments.
Avoiding the obvious tool for the job is classic developer trendytool syndrome.
And yes, this is what I do: maintaining 50+ sites for clients, so I have been round the block a few times, not just making this up.
Also, trying new technologies was literally a goal of the project.
WordPress is insanely customisable - it's "just php". And sure, maybe his new skill learning could be coding on WordPress :-)
I was making a point that the best tool for the job can sometimes be the one which is widely used, hugely supported, cheap to host, well understood - it may not be the trendy choice, but "trendy" is not (in my humble opinion) a terribly good criteria for tech stack decisions...
If you don't want a pre-built theme, you don't need the plugin ecosystem, and you don't need/want a WYSIWYG editor, there's no reason to choose Wordpress.
So: sure, if your cdn and static files can do all of those then yeh. But it can’t.
It would be titled “A New Blog Post for 2024” if all he did was write a new blog post. But if you read the blog post, you’ll see that he overhauled the entirety of his blog.
Maybe an analogy would help. If you’re a game developer and you replace the game engine of your game, you might update your in-game “about/credits” page to mention “in release x.y.z we switched from Unity to Unreal Engine” — what you wouldn’t do is say “in release x.y.z we updated this in-game ‘about’ page to, well… mention that we changed the about ‘about’ page to now state that we changed the ‘about’ page”.
[0] https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...
Most "blogs" nowadays don't have the features you're talking about, because very few people actually care about them anymore. If you really want comments, you can add them via something like Disqus, but so few people are using RSS today that it's not worth bothering with.
When I first started doing web stuff, ColdFusion, Perl, Flash and WAP were The Big Things at the time.
Not so much now.
It may seem like no-one can build anything on the web without having js through and through the stack - but actually you can, and sometimes you should. Even JavaScript will probably one day be relegated to the dustbin of a good idea we all once had…
Btw - this might be the wrong forum to diss RSS ;-)
I see many on HN as being sort of “automatically negative” about Wordpress and php and unable to see that there are actually some times when they’re totally the right tools for the job.
I’d be the last person to suggest anyone use Wordpress for everything - yes, I happen to have a niche that is about this tool, and I like it and am passionate about it, and for what we do it’s highly relevant and very much the right tool - but we’re also very pragmatic about decision making.
What I see so much in developer land is that certain trends drive strategy. It’s so often not the boring, known, stayed tool which wins the day but the bleeding edge one which actually isn’t as good a fit.
As I say in a comment lower down here - the tradeoffs to me here are: no feed, no comments, no categories, no OG tags, no API - all of which are out of the box with Wordpress.
Ok, so learn php when they could just use js which they likely already know and likely get paid to know.
Wordpress and php are negative value skills, you do not want to advertise that you know those things as a developer because someone might try to hire you for them.
This was unnecessary.
I'm already in the part of my career where learning another programming language is not what will take me to the next level so unless there is something unique about a programming language that makes it very useful I'm not interested in learning it.
Learning how to use more tools is not necessarily better when you are already proficient in other more flexible tools.
There's billions of dollars in revenue generated yearly from PHP sites. And not just "legacy" either, I'm talking evergreen PHP apps being built and generating revenue.
It's just as alive and well if not even more alive than some other languages people prefer over it.
Tooling changing in JavaScript is unique to JavaScript only because of the language constraints. PHP, Ruby, etc are all controlled by the developer, whereas JavaScript is controlled by the browser vendors and end users of those browsers. You have more things to work around, inconsistencies to smooth over, and more importantly larger ambition on the frontend than most things can currently support, so new paradigms and frameworks come out to tackle that.
Also 5 years in internet time is a long time. So I'd probably not say it "changes so fast"
The design language is (understandably) feeling a bit 2013 these days, but objectively I think it's held up great.
It's something I'd like to do for my blog, since I'm getting tired of looking at the same static header, but I've yet to come up with the perfect design.
Not a fan, even though it might look “nice”.
(As viewed on an iPhone)
Perhaps the noise doesn't "scale" on mobile as I'm also viewing it on an iPhone and/or is just more apparent in dark mode.
background-image: url(/css/noise.png);
background-repeat: repeat;
background-size: 182px;
filter: brightness(6);
opacity: 0.018;
Here's the last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987713
Perhaps it's related to android version, Firefox version or constraints imparted by your budget phone, but it's not a mobile layout//Firefox specific problem as far as I can tell (and I have like a dozen add-ons installed now that we can install from the full Firefox catalog).
What are your thoughts on HTMX, how would that play when your using the Tailwinds stuff? (sorry, I am not familiar enough to perhaps use precise nomenclature on these two - but just curious on your thought on HTMX as it would relate to your post?
I always enjoy playing with new tech, and HTMX looks fun, though I wouldn't use it for anything serious. If you're looking for something fun and simple, I'd 100% recommend using Svelte on Astro, they're both a joy to use.
I built this with Next.js to learn, because I use it at work, and need to stay 100% up to date when I'm educating others. It also just has such a huge ecosystem which is hard to match.
Tailwind's Catalyst UI kit only supports React, so it wouldn't work I'm afraid!
I will say, though, that there's a bit more manual labor involved in setting up a page and writing content than I would prefer. In some of my articles it would have definitely saved time to just write the content in markdown, and there are a few repeated components on each page that would definitely be nice to extract out.
So anyway, maybe some kind of minor refactor is in order - although every time I consider doing this, I try to remind myself that actually writing / making content is the more important thing to spend time on. Maybe if I ever get to the point where I'm writing multiple posts a week it would be worth optimizing the workflow more.
Exciting to see what more comes whenever you post. Digging this cursor blog as well.
For me, it is overkill. I went in the opposite direction this year, putting more emphasis on my posts (and their readability) rather than visual flourish.
I am planning to do further optimizations (such as font subsetting) to reduce the burden on my site's visitors later this year.
That’s a really nice touch. It does help me with reading, kudos.
feels like something that could be baked into JSX 2.0 bc its such a common need
I may have to revive my own blog now...
Hackernews = 99.9% idle , 0 rendering
Your new blog = 94% idle, 4.7% rendering + painting
Someone mentioned the fans / activity monitor showing cpu usage as well
Even with full static generation, Next.js still makes your site a React application. A page might be pre-rendered completely on the server, but Next will still ship JS to the client for hydrating ... zero dynamic content. Here, speed is not a concern for me (I believe the performance impact (ab)using React for text content is negligible), but the fact that it is just ... not ideal?, irks me so much.
Then I turn to Zola, a more traditional SSG, but then for any interactivity or demo in the posts, I need to add my own vanilla JS, which is a hassle to maintain, and I am not a very good developer. (Though Zola is excellent for completely static sites, much nicer than Hugo IMO.)
I want the site to have zero JS except the sprinkle of React components in the middle of otherwisr semantic DOM nodes for content. The fact that this was seemingly impossible in Next.js is just mind-boggling to me. Then I discovered Astro, which does exactly what I want, no more, no less. Only write markdown? Slap in the official Markdown plugin. Want latex math? Slap in the official remark/rehype plugins and katex stylesheet. Want react components in the middle of the post? Just import it into MDX files. The result? Absolutely no JS if there are no React components, otherwise the only JS shipped is restricted to those components.
(That should have been the logical way to build frontend, and now Next.js is following Remix and Astro with its fine-grained component approach using RSC. Too bad the last time I tried the app router, all markdown plugins broke, while Astro is building my site beautifully.)
Last time I created a blog I aimed to have it up that day.
IMO the text is more important than the HTML and CSS
Of course, I'm not a designer myself so I would see all of this as overkill if I tried to do it. It's enough for me to write in org-mode and export my blog as HTML with a nice template. A static file server can handle a small bunch of HTML files at scale without breaking a sweat, so no need for the JS take on SSR or AWS Lambda functions or what have you.
The noise still overlays the text, it's just not really visible because of the contrast between text and background.
Is it looking better now?
The noise is being applied to everything on the screen (like buttons, sliders, etc).
It might be more readable if the noise was only on the background grey.
Just my 2 cents.