Blog update for May 2021
Thursday, May 20, 2021
blog update
It has been a while since my last post so I'm very happy to be writing again.
Welcome to the newly re-designed blog which is now hosted under netlify and using Nuxt.
The old blog was hosted under App Engine and while that worked great for a while, I was spending too much time coding things related to the blog CMS instead of adding more content. I now enjoy the benefits of managing the content and code of the site under one GitHub repo. I can do local development and content writing with no issues or complexities.
Don't get me wrong, it was a good learning experience and I'm glad I wrote my own CMS for the blog using Go and Google Cloud products but eventually I had enough so I decided to look for a better approach. I still plan to use App Engine and other Google Cloud products to build smaller pieces to support the blog. For example, I want to build a custom comment system so I don't have to use a 3rd party one.
One thing I will miss for sure is the low cost. I never paid more than $0.10 cents per month and for a long time (more than 2 years) I paid nothing because all the resources used by the blog fell under the free quota offered by Google Cloud. That's not to say that netlify is expensive because this site runs fine under their free plan. But for example, if you want to use their analytics add-on so that you don't have to use an external one, like Google Analytics, then that's $9.99 a month. I don't mind paying it because that helps to keep the site less bloated.
Why the design change? A few reasons:
- Got tired of the old design and wanted something simpler and cleaner
- Wanted to remove some external dependencies that made the site feel bloated. For example: AdSense, Disqus
The main driving force with all these changes was that I wanted a workflow that allowed me to spend less time coding and more writing content.
With netlify and nuxt that has been the case.
Feels good to be back :)