Build something!
I’ve finally got this website I’ve been working on published!
Congrats!! How long did it take?
2 years. Two whole years of overthinking, overcomplicating and overengineering. Two excruciating years of having a vision and not being able to follow through.
Ouch. So what changed?
I became less stubborn. I stopped trying to make my own tools, I instead chose one framework and stuck to it. I don’t need this website to build in milliseconds, and I most definitely don’t need to make a new markup to allow conversational posts like this one. I became Mr. Good Enough™ and I’m more than happy with the result.
Everyone has a different style
None of the templates I found on the internet were quite right for me. It was uncomfortable seeing my mannerisms in someone else’s body. I spent two years putting off CSS before I finally decided to just do it myself. I’ve never thought of myself as a designer, but I’ve always been a tinkerer, and Tailwind Play was a great way to get started - I was able to build a basic layout in a few days by making everything a component with Astro.
Is that why you have perfect 100 Lighthouse scores?
Wow, what a shameless brag, how dare you. But yes.
Start off with the minimum
When this website went live,
- it didn’t have Muminek
- it had a single Hello World post
- no table of contents, no reading time, etc.
- there was no RSS feed
At the time of writing this,
- there is only one character, Muminek
- Muminek has only one pose (sitting)
- still no table of contents, no reading time, etc.
- there is only a very basic minimal RSS feed
Should I subscribe to your RSS feed?
That is definitely not why I keep repeating the words RSS feed.
You make do
When you only have a few features to work with it forces you to be creative. It helps you discover how you want the blog to be, although feel free to change it as time goes on.
Once you go live, incrementally adding features is much easier. It somewhat forces you to commit.
Next steps
I’ve had a lot of fun writing this post and getting these things down. I’d really appreciate any feedback regarding this post or the website in general - feel free to reach out to me.
— Matthew