Turning my abandoned blog into a digital shed

It all started with depression, actually. The 2022nd was quite a year, what can I say. And I feel a strong desire to find a peaceful place for my mind after all that I had. To do something with my own hands, something joyful and satisfying. Which inevitably brings me either to coding, or to writing for many years already.

I had came across the concept of digital gardening some time ago, starting from Joel Hooks' website. I had found it quite interesting and worth trying at the time but had no spare minute to rethink my own approach to technical writing and knowledge sharing. Basically, this blog was a result of quick spraying of some brain drops without caring too much about the format — pre-configured Gridsome theme was a decent solution for that.

Now that I came back to it eventually, I want to restructure my blog and make it more personal, with attention to details and thoughtful approach to implementation. I like the way Josh Comeau, or Cassie Evans, or Jason Lengstorf, or James Sinclair do that, and I want to come up with something with a bit of me inside. In addition to good new useful content of course.

Maggie Appleton (whose website is a separate kind of perfection) had made the great job on gathering a ton of information about digital gardening which I cannot recommend highly enough.

My only concern is that... I don't like gardening. My wife is really into it, I'm more about crafts and craftsmanship, both IRL and online. So I decided to change the term to "digital shed" — it's more in line with my view on the topic. I like my physical shed a lot. It's a place of power to me. And the same mood I want to get from my digital place. Not a garden but rather craftsman's shed indeed, or a workshop.

So that's the side I want to approach rebuilding/redesign of my personal website from. And that's gonna be a labour of love definitely.

I wanted to go further with Gridsome initially, but it's very obsolete (I mean, drastically, for this industry) and doesn't develop at all these days. It's blocking me to the point I'm not able to build the code in some situations (though I'm pretty satisfied with the results themselves). So I want to find a proper alternative technology to be able to build quickly and learn something new at the same time, without necessity to fix infrastructure too often, at least for a couple of years. Looking to 11ty, Astro, and Remix now — I like the way guys progress on them these days, and the way how simple and close to native browser APIs these technologies are.

I already did some efforts to bring more love to the way this website looks, works and feels, but these were minor changes. Now I want to put more hours in. I like to do it, and I believe it will bring joy, both to me, and to accidental readers. I also love building stupid things occasionally just for fun and for the sake of it (having heard of this kind of projects from Salma Alam-Naylor and other creators), so this approach to creative process will probably have its impact here as well.

And this is it — as it's usually made for digital gardens — a quick note about some personally meaningful stuff. I hope for a whole lot of them very soon — my draft list consists of a couple of dozens of new posts. Let it be my New Year's resolution, of a kind.

See you there soon 🖖

Cover photo by Nico Smit from Unsplash