👷🏻♂️ Work in progress
There are moments when a person thinks: this is a good idea. Building your own website, for example. Not with a ready-made theme where all you have to do is add your name and a photo, but properly, by yourself. A bit of HTML here, some CSS there, a pinch of Jekyll on top, and before you know it you are having arguments with yourself on a weekday evening about whether a margin of 1.4 rem should perhaps be 1.35 rem.
Welcome to my test blog.
At the moment this page has only one serious job: proving that the blog feature works without the rest of the website spontaneously going up in smoke. That sounds simple, but with websites “just testing something quickly” is roughly the same as saying to an old car: “I’m only going to tighten this one little screw.” Before you know it, half the engine is lying on the driveway and you have three parts left over that nobody can place any more.
Fortunately we have rules here. Build first. Then check. Then check again. Then make a release folder, send it to staging, run a dry run and only then deploy. That sounds excessive until you have once changed something directly in production and five minutes later find yourself looking at a screen where a life-size fox is suddenly lying across the navigation.
That fox, by the way, now has an official function. It is no longer just a fox. It is a “signature element”. That immediately sounds as if a design agency was involved that, after six workshops and a moodboard, established that the animal “supports the visitor’s warm digital identity”. In reality we just thought it looked nice.
PageSpeed is also keeping a strict eye on things. Four hundreds is the agreement. Not 99 because “that’s very good too”. A hundred. Performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. It feels a bit like coming home with a report card with three tens and one nine, after which someone asks: “And what went wrong with that one subject?”
Of course the blog itself should eventually be about something. About technology, the internet, work, family history, things that catch my eye and probably, now and then, something I thought was a small subject beforehand that then grows into two thousand words. That comes with the territory. Writing short is, after all, mostly easy as long as you haven’t started yet.
There is also still some thinking to do about categories, tags, images, dates, share buttons and probably an RSS feed that three people will get excited about, one of whom is me. After that there will undoubtedly be the question of whether a blog card on mobile should have 14 or 16 pixels of padding. Big questions in life come in unexpected shapes.
For now this is therefore building material. A test article with a title, a date, some text and hopefully, soon, a neat card on the blog page. If all goes well, you as a visitor will only see the tidy end result. The commands, backups, dry runs, hashes and slight moments of panic stay neatly behind the scenes.
And should you still be reading this years from now, there are two possibilities. Either this test post was accidentally never deleted, or it has by now become historical heritage.
In that latter case I kindly ask future generations not to change anything about it.
It works, after all.