Hello again, world

git checkout -b v2

Hello again.

This is a complete rewrite of my website, this time written in NodeJS via Typescript.

My previous website (written in Gatsby, delivered as a static website via GitHub pages) worked really well, but I wasn't keeping it up to date.

Though Gatsby worked very well, my expertise lies more in the backend. Using Gatsby didn't give me an opportunity to work with NodeJS since it's delivered as a static site.

So, enter NodeJS + Typescript!

The tech stack

As mentioned, I tried to keep this simple. So here's how it all fits together:

• NodeJS (Typescript)
• Express for the http server
• Markdown files on disk for the blogs, transformed into HTML via marked
• EJS for rendering views
• Tailwind CSS, with Flowbite for components on top of Tailwind
• Render for hosting the web server
• Cloudflare for providing DNS and SSL

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this works. Gatsby worked well, but it was a little "magic".

I prefer knowing how all the bits fit together and having control over it.

Of course, I don't recommend anyone to do this themselves for hosting such a simple website. Something like Gatsby (or Hugo, or equivalent) is much more appropriate. But I wanted a project to keep me busy and shake off the dust on my NodeJS skills. So this was the perfect solution!

Maybe I'll keep writing blogs this time, too... Who knows.