about the creation of this blog

Posted on:December 18, 2023 at 08:22 PM

The technologies I used to create this blog are:

Why are those technologies used and what for?

GitHub

I guess I don’t need to explain to anyone reading this why I have chosen GitHub as a CV system. But I assume the more relevant question is why I decided to run a blog driven by a GitHub repo instead of using a hosted CMS like WordPress.

The simple answer is: I’m a developer, so I like to have full power over the system and don’t like to have a black box I need to dig into when something is not working as expected. Additionally, why not use the same technologies I’m using in my daily work and private interests to create such a blog.

It’s really attractive, from the point of a developer view, being able to create a blog post simply by adding a markdown file to a folder of my git repo compared to doing hundreds of clicks in a bloated CMS web UI. And at least all the created content is managed by git instead of being an unstructured blob in a database.

Astro

When talking about my plan to create a blog under those conditions, my colleague Jonathan David Xebia-icon suggested using Astro, which was a really good choice by now.

With Astro you can either generate static web pages or even SPAs. The resulting web page Astro generates, static or as SPA, is really fast when loading: http://Astro.build

There are also some themes available, paid and free, where I chose the AstroPaper theme. This theme supports React React-icon.

As you are able to generate a cool blog with Astro the next big question was:

Where and how do I host my blog?

…since working for Xebia-icon‘s Microsoft service line this question can be answered easily…

giscus

Finally, I noticed that the blog did not yet give the option to create user comments.

For this giscus comes on the stage.
giscus adds support for a commenting section based on the discussion feature of the underlying GitHub repo. This is really nice, as you don’t need a database or need to take care about authentication. Feel free to leave me a note using that cool feature right below.