| https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/its-not-just-a-blog/ |
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It's not just a blog |
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Cory Dransfeldt |
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Lately, one of the things I've most enjoyed doing on this site has been expanding on the facets of it that aren't strictly related to the blog. I've been working around the edges on filling out music, movie, TV and book related functionality. |
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| <p>Lately, one of the things I've most enjoyed doing on this site has been expanding on the facets of it that aren't strictly related to the blog. I've been working around the edges on filling out music, movie, TV and book related functionality.</p><p>I've made adding links easier and associated attribution simpler. I've exposed a lot of the media-related content I've added, while also adding simple lists <a href="https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/integrating-a-somewhat-custom-cms-with-eleventy/">in the admin</a> that show me shows and movies to watch, books to read and upcoming albums to pick up.</p><p>Is most of this — or any of this — interesting to visitors? I don't know, probably not as much as it is to me. I spent time programmatically generating pages for each show, movie, book, artist and genre. It takes a bit to build and that's ok — though I did remove "all-time" pages in the interest of preventing things from slowing over time.</p><p>I've learned a lot doing this and the site has sprawled from a self-contained repository to a repository containing the front end, Cloudflare workers as APIs that get updated of their own accord, a CDN, a database, a CMS. It'd be hard to say it's not all over-engineered. <em>But</em> — it's fun and that's been the most important thing to me.</p><p>It's replaced my usage of The Storygraph, <a href="http://Last.fm">Last.fm</a>, Trakt et al. I liked those services — I still do — but that all sits in house now.</p><p>This is what I love about the web — you can build what you want, what you want to use, maintain it (or not), have fun with it, throw something out as a novelty or dig deep and keep adding to it. There's underlying infrastructure — that's hard to avoid — but the tools are there and you can build whatever you'd like. It doesn't have to be a blog — it can be — and that can take whatever shape you want it to.</p><p><strong class="highlight-text">Build what you want and have fun doing it.</strong></p> |
Lately, one of the things I've most enjoyed doing on this site has been expanding on the facets of it that aren't strictly related to the blog. I've been working around the edges on filling out music, movie, TV and book related functionality.I've made adding links easier and associated attribution simpler. I've exposed a lot of the media-related content I've added, while also adding simple lists in the admin that show me shows and movies to watch, books to read and upcoming albums to pick up.Is most of this — or any of this — interesting to visitors? I don't know, probably not as much as it is to me. I spent time programmatically generating pages for each show, movie, book, artist and genre. It takes a bit to build and that's ok — though I did remove "all-time" pages in the interest of preventing things from slowing over time.I've learned a lot doing this and the site has sprawled from a self-contained repository to a repository containing the front end, Cloudflare workers as APIs that get updated of their own accord, a CDN, a database, a CMS. It'd be hard to say it's not all over-engineered. But — it's fun and that's been the most important thing to me.It's replaced my usage of The Storygraph, Last.fm, Trakt et al. I liked those services — I still do — but that all sits in house now.This is what I love about the web — you can build what you want, what you want to use, maintain it (or not), have fun with it, throw something out as a novelty or dig deep and keep adding to it. There's underlying infrastructure — that's hard to avoid — but the tools are there and you can build whatever you'd like. It doesn't have to be a blog — it can be — and that can take whatever shape you want it to.Build what you want and have fun doing it. |
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