Personal Site

If you're reading this, then you're looking at this project - welcome!

Purpose of this site

I wanted to create my own corner of the web where I could showcase projects, record my thoughts, leave interesting links, and hide little easter eggs. I also wanted to use this as an excuse to use a tech stack that I hadn't used before.

I have seen several people talk about the idea of having a "digital garden" instead of a traditional blog. I liked the concept of having an ever evolving space where I could share and cultivate thoughts over a period of time.

Inspiration for this concept came from Joel Hooks and Gossip's Web (though this would not fit in there due to relying "heavily on a JavaScript framework"). I should also probably mention that inspiration for the design came from Raycast.

Behind the scenes

My major motivation for building this site the way I did was to play with some technologies that I hadn't used before - namely Vue.js and Tailwind CSS.

I wanted to be able to host the site statically on Netlify and still be able to write posts in a natural and convenient way. For that reason I chose to use Gridsome to allow for static site generation - and also extremely fast performance.

Gridsome allows me to use a local directory of Markdown files for managing content. This meant that I would be able to use an Obsidian vault as a CMS. I already use Obsidian daily to jot down notes and to-dos, so it seemed a natural fit to house the posts for this site.

Is this overkill for what could have been a very simple blog?

Yes - entirely. But it was a lot of fun to put together.