It’s time to get back into the weeknotes mode of blogging. Just a quick roll up of what’s going on in my little dev world. I’m planning to throw my extra time this summer into some projects so they’ll be more problems to solve (and errors to vent about).
I’m not commiting to weekly notes though. So I’ll just call this Dev notes and aim for every other week. Let’s see what happens.
Shipped
colbywhite.dev has been revamped.
Moved away from the Remix + CloudFlare set up I had. I was never cuckoo for the local dev experience that CloudFlare forces upon you. When you don’t use it often, it’s disorientating to come back to it. Still think CloudFlare has an awesome product, but I’m 50/50 on whether or not I actually want to use it.
I’m now on a Astro + Netlify set up. Super simple to me and Astro is more tailored to a blog with extra features than Remix. And I don’t have to use React.
Let’s be honest, not using React is the main appeal.
Thoughts on using starter projects
I used Astro Paper as the starter for the revamp to move me along quicker. I like the simplicity of the design, but I’m not sure if it was necessarily quicker.
I had the quite obvious light bulb that using a starter for its nice styling means you are also using any coding paradigms the author used. Once I started making changes, I couldn’t help but see things that weren’t my cup of tea when it came to code design and organization.
Since it’s a starter, it’s designed for users to configure things. A lot of that configuration will never change for me. There were components that I needed to redesign to make them reusable. The content collection code design wasn’t ready for a second schema to be added.
Etc, etc, etc.
They’re all little things, but they added up.
I start up so many Astro projects nowadays that I’m thinking of making a CLI that can create things the way I like them. Personalized starters if you will. They would just have an audience of one: me. So not a lot of impact … 🤷.
I do like the style though.
The never-ending project list
I attempted to list out all the projects that have been floating around in the back of my head.
- AutoForm web component: My first attempt at this was in a RedwoodJS context, and thus React. It’d have more impact as a web component.
- Shoelace Extended: I want a carousel component on top of the Shoelace carousel that adds some common sense business logic (i.e. only load a subset of set of images for perf reasons). There are likely other ideas to build on top of other Shoelace comps.
- Edit: I keep forgetting that Web Awesome is becoming a thing. (I think it’s effectively Shoelace + Font Awesome + 11ty.) This likely changes this bullet point in some tangible way.
- Plop templates for personal starters: See above.
- Shoelace-based icon switch: I have an image for a light/dark mode switch that is a specific type of flipping animation. I’m sure I saw it somewhere else but can’t find it and might have to build it myself.
- Astro preload image component: I’d love if the act of putting Astro’s
<Image>component on a page resulting in a corresponding<link rel="preload">in the<head>. - colbywhite.dev: I always have new ideas for this. Easy markdown footnotes. A comp that shows the bookmarks in between posts. Maybe replacing my Raindrop-powered bookmarks for something more RSS-focused.
And then there are some apps that I want to build for myself. None of them have a wide audience. Writing all these down made it obvious I build for myself, for better or worse.
- Task Planner: I structure my todo lists in a very personalized format. If it doesn’t exist, build it yourself.
- Gym Hero: I track my workouts in a specific format that most fitness apps fail at, which has been a pet peeve of mine for years.
- Golf DB: I want to golf on the mathematically easiest golf courses until I get good enough to level up. Most course searches and/or databases don’t organize them like this.
- lop.family: My extended family has been thinking about having our own site to do family things for a while now. I think our first use cases might be family slideshows.
Reading through this one last time, I’m not sure which to start with first. So many ideas, so little time.