This blog is running. Literally. Okay maybe figuratively. But it is running in the sense that it is going to be constantly changing. There will be an art to this blog! Yes, I know there are some static site generators, but I have never really liked those because I do not think it would be a demonstration of my skill and design. I intentially am trying to custom bake everything as much as I can on this site from scratch. Why, because it’s a hobby, and I am a web applications developer.
The first structure of this site was built on a fastify node web server. I thought to try it out due to their claims of fast responses. I deployed the web server on a digital ocean droplet. In order to handle network connections I installed nginx and ssl certificates. In the nginx settings, I set up a proxy to route to a local port in which I would deploy my website. My website would then be ran on a process using the forever npm module.
Now in my most recent site update (this week) I decided to ditch fastify and forever npm modules. Fastify seemed a little bit too strange for my taste, and I did not exactly want forever to be running my website. I replaced fastify with good ol’ express, it has a lot of support and a great structure to it. I replaced forever with a Docker image so that I can later connect a database image to my website. Which brings me to what I would like my website to look and be like.
Progressive web apps are increasingly becoming the standard for web pages. That would mean that my website should preferrably be a single page application. The only way that I can figure out that would work is by hooking up a database with all the blog metadata. Once a database is connected, then I can make a API route to make an RSS feed (yes I don’t have one) to include some old people out there. However, to probably get user retention, I think I would put more emphasis on the progressive web application features to show how a blog can utilize modern mobile experiences.