First Post

Hello world! These are some notes on how I've built this blog.

I started with astro and had something working. I went on to setup github pages and, after a few tries, had it setup so it would deploy on each push on the main branch. Then, my partner told me I needed comments, which I hadn't thought about. This turned out more complicated than I thought. After looking at the options: disqus would introduce ads, which I didn't want, and utterences would only allow people with github accounts to comment.

Since I recently learned about next.js through a project at work, I'd thought why not use that to write my own comments component and learn more about react? As the blog is compiled into a static page, I chose firebase to persist the comments, as I've used that in the past to collect data during my time as a researcher (more on that another time).

Setting up the initial blog with nextjs was quite smooth, as the tutorial had me do exactly what I wanted: take a folder of markdown files and turn them into html blog posts. Next I made a start on the comments component, only to give up after a while and spin up gemini-cli. I had tried that earlier on the astro blog, where it got to something working locally. However, it spit out a single file, which I did not know how to split into the "static" and client side part easily, so I abandoned that approach and started over with nextjs. After I knew more closely how it should look like, it was easier to evaluate the changes gemini was proposing. Initially, I asked for comments with firestore persistence, and then asked to extend it to nested comments. Finally, I added a dark mode toggle, because why not.

When everything was looking fine, I got to work on the deployment again, which I managed quickly thanks to this blog post.

All in all, I enjoyed the process. I hope this will get me to write more regularly. Stay tuned for some content on stats, ML, programming and whatever else!