My first post

print "Hello World!"

This is my first blog post on my new handcrafted blog.

I thought about going with a static website generator such as Hugo or Jekyll, but after using them in the past I never felt like I had true ownership of what I could or could not do. Hand-crafting a single-page application was better because I knew each and every part of my stack, and I could swap out dependencies more easily.

Current capabilities (4-5-2017):

  • Support for:
    • Markdown!! (via markdown-it)
    • Syntax highlighting for code blocks (via markdown-it-prism)
    • Images (via file-loader and webpack)
    • File upload and fetching (via axios)
    • Basic routing (via react-router)

Remaining TODOs:

  • Add in working support (no console errors) for:
    • UML diagrams or equivalent via markdown-it-mermaid or js-sequence-diagrams
    • TeX support w/ KaTeX via markdown-it-katex
    • Disqus comment forums or equivalent
    • Google Analytics integrations and SEO optimization
  • Generate easily usable deployment pipeline with npm or bash scripts
  • YAML or TOML base configs to go with each markdown blog post, because having metadata to organize by is nice at any meaningful scale
  • Webpack code splitting with react-router
  • Fully responsive and mobile-friendly navbar with hamburger icon
  • In-browser real-time markdown editor for editing and generating new blog posts
  • Serverless authentication (not sure if it's an oxymoron)
  • Linting. So much linting.

I'll write a brief architectural overview of this application after getting it deployed. Excited to see where this goes.