This nice, long weekend was a reset moment for me. After being away from home for most of the last few weekends, I was able to catch up on chores, try some new variations of my blackberry crumble, and make some real progress on this website.
The work started with some easy, low hanging fruit. At the end of the day Friday, I didn't have enough energy to dive into a big problem, so I just upgraded some dependencies with Renovate and got my analytics tool installed. It's not set up to do anything right now, but at least its there and I can build upon it in the future.
The main goal for the website this weekend was to get the bare-bones blog functionality working. I wanted to get a system setup to let me easily write these blogs in markdown (or something similar) and transform that into a nice UI that creates an enjoyable reading experience. After some research, MDX seemed like a good platform to build off. NextJS even supports it out of the box.
Following the setup guides was easy and I had a setup going in no time, sans styles. Those will come later, once I get the design of this site figured out. I think that focusing on getting some content on the site first will help me test out different design ideas. To that end, I wrote 3 posts (this one, one on my homelab hardware, and one on my experiences with Infrastrucrure as Code).
Lastly, I started documenting all the random ideas I've been having about this website, so that I can remember them for later and focus on the task at hand.