New styling

Exploring some new styling and colors for a softer, clearer look. Looking very very similar to another blog site I know as a matter of fact T-T

shoutsouts

Bye Netlify

After hitting my Netlify monthly limit during testing (forgot to disable auto build on github push), I've successfully switched to Github Actions as the CI process for rebuilds. Like before, CRUD operations trigger a firebase function which checks auth and then triggers a Github Actions workflow, rebuilding and redeploying the site (only one process allowed at a time to prevent wasted concurrency in overlapped requests).

It has the same issue of being a little slow to show in live, but thats just one of the drawbacks of full static site generation. I'm pretty happy with this implementation now, and hopefully the limits are far more sane. Will look into self hosting this Actions runner as well.

Edit
We've now switched to a self-hosted runner. This edit's changes were propagated with the Lotus home server!

Implementation Lamentation

Now that the site is in its most basic working state, I’m not super satisfied with the implementation. I initially intended on keeping everything “within” firebase, from database to storage to hosting and functions. However it seems firebase has poor support for static rebuilds and updates to their hosting, something I need to investigate further.

Currently we use Netlify for hosting, allowing us to use a firebase function to request site rebuilds (requiring an authenticated user of course). While it works, I’m not fully satisfied with the disjointed operation, even if it does work fine for now.

Other pursuits would be figuring out a function or switching to github actions CI, which is the same as Netlify honest—-just with more manual work.

Recap of Today

Major Revision

Blog rewrite switched from scratch SSG to astro. Ultimately the same end product for a much easier development experience without having to reinvent the wheel.

Making stuff from scratch is cool (at the cost of time and patience).

Introduction of new admin editor and dashboard with auth, with serverless CRUD on articles. This is lacking a site rebuild still -> changing posts doesn't reflect in "prod." Can be faked with javascript, but loses the main point: SSG!

Lost Features

No more highlight.js syntax highlighting -> will be added later

Still Need

• image (and eventually file) uploads
• guest/co-writers
• site rebuild/some solution on CRUD

cya !