rossmcmillan

I built this blog in a rush

And it still turned out pretty sweet
13 January 2022
Web development

TL;DR

Remix.run, Tailwind and CloudFlare Workers made building this blog incredibly easy.

I need a blog

I recently read Show your work by Austin Kleon. It’s an inspiring book I encourage everyone to read, but I won’t get into that now. The long story short is: I have a sudden burst of inspiration to write publicly, and therefore, I need a blog.

I have my old website at rossmcmillan.co.uk, but I’m lazy and don’t really want to rebuild it, nor build a blog on top of it. Speed and simplicity are of the essence, and I need to keep on the path of least resistance for my sanity’s sake. I just want to write.

CloudFlare

CF (CloudFlare) blows my mind. I often finding myself searching for a solution, and come to find that a CF service is the answer. The most recent example of such being a privacy-focused Google analytics alternative that I wanted for this website.

Another example was a serverless DB, which turned out to be Workers KV. In the end, I swapped KV for FaunaDB, as I was interested in learning GraphQL, but that was just as easy to use on CF Workers as KV was.

Remix

I don’t think I can say anything about Remix that hasn’t already been said. It has changed the web dev game for the better and I look forward to building much more with it. It has shown that less is so much more.

Tailwind

Tailwind is the frontend developer’s wet dream.

I have spent a lot of time learning how to write and maintain CSS properly, in particular Sass. BEM and ITCSS were once cornerstones in my personal and professional projects.

For new projects going forward, I’ll use TW (Tailwind) only.

TW simplifies so much and removes the burden of maintaining a large Sass codebase. Even when CSS/Sass is written well and doesn’t cause problems, which is easy enough with BEM and ITCSS, I would still throw it all out in favour of TW.

For those who hate TW, I doubt I will convert you here in this blog. I can only encourage you to try it out for a little longer.

For those who love TW, I’m sure you already understand how using it made building this website so much faster.

Results

In a few hours’ work, I have built a decent-looking website/blog. It’s hosted on the edge and scores a perfect 100 on Lighthouse, which wasn’t quite automatic but it was damn close.

Perfect score on lighthouse for all categories except PWA

(I haven’t got to the PWA stage yet, although that shouldn’t be too difficult to implement either)

Just build

I started this project wanting to keep code to a minimal so I could just write my dumb blogs. It has not only done that, but opened my eyes to how easy it is to just build.