Hello! Rising from the ashes, a blog is reborn, one that didn't last before due to lack of money, time, and maybe creativity... Yes, "Bar do Clovão" existed about 10 years ago as a project made during high school, by a teenager who didn't really know what he wanted to do.
Everything was well indexed by Google (which is great, and not every blog gets right), back when the idea wasn't exactly a blog, but more of a geek content website, with reviews, news, and maybe even a podcast. At the time, I thought about a "differential": mixing football and nerd content all in one place. Genius?
Why come back?
I always thought about bringing the blog back, but something always got in the way. I needed to focus on studying and/or working, and in my free time, I needed to relax, after all, no one is made of steel. During that time, the blog was left behind, and new opportunities appeared. I ended up focusing on another field: audiovisual (that story is for another day).
I've noticed that many people think like this: "Why should I do something if there are already so many others doing it?" For a long time, that was one of my blockers. But with time, maturity brought a stronger sense of "whatever, I'll just do it." That mindset prevents you from learning something new, from having a healthy hobby, from meeting new people, it's a waste of opportunity.
Once I realized that, I started studying audio and video techniques, and learned a lot about streaming software. And through all that learning, I realized it would be great to go back to writing about what I like, with no pressure.
So, the blog won't have daily posts anymore just to feed indexing algorithms, it'll be something lighter, just like the new layout: simple and practical. I also decided to put my software development skills into practice. Back in 2015, I was still learning and coding as a hobby.
At the time, I rushed the design using WordPress, stuffing it with plugins and frameworks to speed things up, which made technical adjustments annoying and heavy (especially on a free server), and took time away from what really mattered: writing content.
Now, the content will be whatever I feel like writing, whether it's an analysis or just notes for future reference. And the most fun part: sharing it all on the internet!
Below I'll leave some notes about the blog engine, it gets a bit technical, but I plan to open-source the code in the future for anyone who wants to use it.
How was this built?
First of all, since this is a personal project, I don't chase every front-end library out there. I like doing things my own way, after all, it's personal, and it shouldn't feel like work. It should be fun.
Of course, I didn't build everything from scratch, I used some React libraries.
So let's start: I used plain React (no framework) to have full control. I based it on an existing engine that takes a Markdown (md) file and transforms it into this HTML post (since browsers don't understand markdown natively).
I needed libraries like react-markdown, remark-gfm, and
gray-matter.
My post template looks like this:
---
title: ""
thumbnail: ""
date: "2001-01-01T00:00:03+00:00"
description: ""
categories:
- category
tags:
- tag
draft: true
---
I use gray-matter to read the frontmatter, react-markdown to parse
the content, and remark-gfm to enhance it, improving things like
image rendering with captions.
Another cool feature is embedding videos. Markdown doesn't support
iframe natively, but remark-gfm can detect URLs and turn them into
embedded videos.
And that's it, fully responsive and customizable HTML output.
That's about it for now. The blog is easy to maintain, easy to publish new posts, and any text editor will do the job. GitHub and Netlify handle the rest.
Thanks for reading!