The Intro

Creating a blog from scratch, designing and developing the interface and deciding on the content

Welcome to the first installment of A Month Learning. You can read about the goal of this blog here. What better way to kickoff the project than documenting the process of creating the blog itself?

What's this all about?

The idea for this whole thing came pretty sporadically while I was sitting on the front porch of an Airbnb in a small Florida fishing village called Aripeka. Never heard of it? Me either. My fiancé's mom booked a spot there for a month starting at the end of January into February of 2021 and invited us to stay with her. Deciding between some Florida sun and the start of a particularly brutal New York winter wasn't a hard choice. Our time there was mostly spent working, taking walks, kayaking, and playing cards. Nothing too extraordinary, but a much needed reprieve from the city and our apartment which was a loft and had zero separation of space (we've since moved to Milwaukee!).

When we weren't doing any of those things and I had a few minutes of spare time, I was playing around with a technology called three.js—which is a JavaScript library for creating 3D stuff in a web browser. After a week or so of getting really excited working with it, I was thinking of ways I could redesign my portfolio in 3D and how it would be a fun process to document. Spoiler: I didn't do anything with it (yet).

Though I didn't utilize three.js directly, something did happen as I was exploring it. I had a really eye opening (brain opening?) thought about how I spend my time learning stuff. Bear with me here, I know it's quite a big jump from using a 3D library to why I'm starting a blog about learning—but that's how my brain works.

I'm always tinkering, experimenting, and learning new things. Sometimes cool stuff comes out of it like this MTA tracker. Sometimes I start something, lose steam, and it ends up in my graveyard of ideas. Like an idea for a Lorem Ipsum generator but for designers in the media space. RIP poor, poor ideas. If I had a better structure to come up with meaningful goals and document my learnings, would I be more inclined to learn stuff? Would more of my ideas come to life? Would it also just peter out and end up in the great beyond? Let's find out.

I thought a blog would be a great way to check in periodically to see what kind of progress I've made. It could also be a spot where I collect and gather all my resources. When you're working on anything, sometimes it's pretty tough to see any actionable gains throughout the process. That's largely where I—and I imagine many others—start losing interest. It's also sometimes hard to wade through the endless amount of resources we have at our fingertips.

The structure

There are a million ways to build a blog. Well, maybe just like a handful. But just know that the solution I landed on is definitely not the only route. And might not be the best route for everyone. Maybe not even for me. I went in a bit more of a technical, build it from the ground up approach because I wanted full control over the structure of how things would look, what kind of features I could include, the flexibility of adding things along the way, and the overall shape of my data and how it's being used. And, well, I wanted to learn some new stuff about development along the way—so is the spirit of A Month Learning.

To build out this blog, I landed on using Gatsby as a framework and Netlify for my hosting and deployment needs. Gatsby is a React based framework for creating websites (for non-technical folks React is a JavaScript library for building interfaces)(and for the less technical folks JavaScript is a scripting/programming language that gives a website the exciting interactive bits)(and for the less, less technical folks...well you can skip this part). Netlify is a platform that does a ton of stuff around automating web projects. For the sake of brevity and to cut down on technical bloat in this post (you can read the technical post here) I'm using Netlify to host my website.

The choice was slightly arbitrary since there are plenty of solutions out in the world, but for the sake of avoiding decision paralysis I landed here. But I largely wanted to build this following a Jamstack architecture. The reason I went with these two platforms is because they both are something I have dabbled in a little bit, but it's still prime territory for me to flex my skills and learn some new things along the way.

Goals

I have two goals in mind for creating this blog:

1. The first is the obvious one, just make the actual blog and launch it into the world.
2. The second is to trial the overall structure and find out what I might need to tweak as I start writing more. Over time I'm sure it will change, but figuring out this structure will also help me inform the overall design and layout.
3. The final goal is really just to provide a flexible and scalable framework for me to learn. I haven't been consistent in how I document things, or really even how I gather my thoughts. I'm hoping this blog will help change that.

Where I'm starting

My day job is a Product Designer at Morning Brew, and previously at The Wall Street Journal—so I'm starting out with a good understanding of a few things that are relevant to this project.

Things like visual design/hierarchy for content, the types of components needed to create reusable and dynamic templates, and SEO optimization (at a high enough level for my purposes here).

On the side I do dev work for my personal projects and the occasional freelance job, so I have a bit of experience in the tech I'll be using to build this. I've worked with React quite a bit and I've also done some preliminary research into Gatsby for a project that never came to fruition. I've also used Netlify to deploy most of the sites I've created.

If you don't know what any of these things are, that's okay the point is to explain them throughout the process. So though I have a bit of experience in these things already, I'll try and provide relevant resources to those who may be new to these technologies.

Here we go! Be sure to follow me on Instagram and Twitter where I'll document some snippets throughout my journey.