Not an Ideal Start

Published on:

July 9, 2023

Categories:

CSS⁵⁵, Personal¹⁶

Current music:

Daughter — Shallows

Current drink:

Sencha tea

Introduction

Hey hey! This is the first entry in my new blog.

I did write an introduction to it on my site — you can read it there for my reasoning about why I did create it and what would be different from the articles on the main site.

In short: to have a more personal place, where I could share random things, experiment with new tech, and separate all of this from my regular polished articles about CSS and Frontend.

Though, at least initially, this blog still would be rather technical, but we’ll see how things would progress!

The Stack

1. Netlify — my main site is hosted there, the domain is registered with it, making it very easy to just continue using it. Almost no complains.
2. Astro — wanted to try for a while, and while it works, I’m not entirely sure I would stick with it. But at least for a while I’ll stick with it — would be unwise to dismiss it right away.
3. TypeScript — first time I’ll be using it outside of my work. I sincerely think that once you have it set up, it can help tremendously. I cannot imagine writing JS without relying on types — either with a proper setup or at least via a @ts-check in a .js file.
4. MDX — in all my previous blog iterations, I always pushed markdown to the maximum, inventing new syntax for the things I wanted to have in it and so on — the ability to rely on components and remark plugins would make the things I want to do with content much more convenient.

Everything Else — From Scratch

I decided to opt out of any built-in CSS from the Astro starter and not take anything from my existing site’s CSS. Having a blank canvas would allow me to experiment with CSS in any way I want, and I have some ideas of what I want to do here.

So, for now, you might notice the absence of almost any styles — things will change a lot in the future!

Bumps on the Road

I was a bit naive, thinking that starting from scratch with a modern stack would go smoothly. It didn’t!

1. Right away, I had a bunch of TS issues in VS Code, getting the “Cannot find module ‘astro:content’…” issue and others. Restarting the TS server did not help, and running astro sync did not help. Updating VS Code and restarting it a few times did help though. Things are overcomplicated in the modern front-end for sure.
2. When I was hooking up Netlify for my repo via netlify-cli, I had a few hiccups due to it using the same 3000 port for the thing it was doing as my Astro dev server that was running at the same time. Lesson learned: next time I’d like to set up a new Netlify site, I will stop the dev server right away.
3. The RSS experience in the Astro blog starter was not ideal:
   • While I did choose to use TS, it came with the rss.xml.js from the box, so I had to rename it to rss.xml.ts and adjust a few type-related things inside (import APIContext from astro to use as the context’s type and fix the type issue for the value passed into site field).
   • The BaseHead.astro template did not come with a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" … />, so I had to add it manually.
   • Not a big deal, but the generated RSS was not using Atom and did not have a language field, so I had to use the xmlns and customData to provide these.
4. I did not like how the content collections work in Astro: no good way to control the slug, provide default values for metadata based on the files, and some other issues. I think I would have to explore the integration API and remark plugins as a way to augment it to do what I want from it, but so far the experience was subpar.

But hey! Things work for now, and I will see how things would scale. Astro islands is also a thing that I really hope to delve into as a very convenient way to add dynamic content to my articles — and if that part would go smoothly, to see if I could somehow integrate it onto my main site.

That’s it for now! There are a lot of things I already want to write here, but I’ll try not to throw everything into one post.

Until later!

Oh, wait!

CSS Snapshot

Just for fun — not sure how long I could keep it up — I’ll try writing about which changes and additions I’m adding to the blog alongside every article.

With this article, here is the complete CSS I have in this blog:

html {
	color-scheme: light dark;
}

body {
	box-sizing: border-box;
	max-width: 42rem;
	min-height: 100vh;
	padding: 1rem;
	margin: 0 auto;

	font-size: 1.25rem;
	/* https://modernfontstacks.com/ */
	font-family:
		'Iowan Old Style',
		'Palatino Linotype',
		'URW Palladio L',
		P052,
		serif;
}

code {
	white-space: pre-wrap;
	tab-size: 2;
}

And that’s it. For now.

Other than the basic styles making things slightly more readable, I’m adding one thing I wanted to try for a while — relying on the built-in system fonts instead of any custom ones. I did choose the “Old Style” stack from a very helpful “Modern Font Stacks” project by Dan Klammer for now, but I’ll pay more attention to everything around typography at a later point.