Website Rewrite 2

Two weeks ago, I rewrote my personal website again.

This time, I rewrote it using Laravel. My theory is that Laravel is super flexible and will let me do anything I want, so maybe I’ll stick with the framework this time.

Of course, that’s been the hope with every rewrite in the past, including that time I rewrote my website in Laravel.

I actually kept the design the same, mostly just recreating the old site. I added a photo of myself on the homepage though, so visitors can imagine what I look like.

I initially moved my editing interface to Laravel Filament, but got fed up with the editor that came built in.

So instead, I moved editing blog posts to GitHub Issues. (For those unfamiliar, GitHub is a place where developers save their code, and Issues is a feature for keeping track of bugs with your code.) I’m abusing Issues by making each “issue” a blog post, and using tags to keep track of drafts, etc.

I really like using GitHub’s markdown writing editor, so I’m liking this setup!

For those technically-minded: I cache the GitHub issues in Redis, and have a webhook set up in GitHub that refreshes that cache every time a GitHub issue is edited.

I also added an email newsletter for my blog. I send it weekly, with updates about things that I find interesting and links to my blog posts from the last week. I have a quite rudimentary setup, where I store email addresses in my Laravel app’s database and then send emails by pasting email addresses into my personal email client.

The biggest thing that I’ve added with this website rewrite is free-form pages. They’re pages that aren’t blog posts, which I also write in GitHub Issues.

The idea for these pages came out of me wanting to publish class notes and make my website more like a library.

Because of that, there’s no centralized index of all the free-form pages: they’re simply linked together where it makes sense.

My hope is that I’ll start adding other types of writing to my website that don’t make sense as blog posts: for example, notes from a programming course or summaries of Black Mirror episodes. In the fall, I want to use these free-form pages to write up notes from all of the classes I’m taking.