New website!
My new website is finally out!
After almost a month of working on it, I finally decided to release it publicly. I still have some features I would like to add to it, but I feel like it's ready to go live now :)
This new website was entirely rewritten from scratch, including the existing blog posts I had on my old blog. I have rewritten those using the new CMS integration.
This new website is also completely written in English, whereas my old website was in Portuguese. I eventually plan on adding internationalization (i18n) to it, but the default language will be English.
Old website layout:
Some background history
I initially purchased the lucasfadriano.dev domain back in February of 2021 with the intention of starting my own blog. Back then I didn't want to write any HTML or CSS, my only goal was to write tech-related posts using an easy markup language (so I could style my posts a tiny bit), that's why I decided to use Hugo.
Hugo allowed me to quickly start my own blog using Markdown as the markup language and it also provided me with a ton of free themes I could choose from, which got me excited right away!
In less than a month I have bought my own .dev domain, I created my personal website and had already written two posts on it, things were going great.
However, after writing those two posts the excitement appeared to have vanished, I had a bunch of ideas for posts written down on my notes but I just didn't want to write anymore, it started to feel like a burden sitting in front of the computer to write.
Fast forward two years and my website still looked the same in 2023, with no new posts and no other changes.
New website ideas and inspirations
I wanted to re-write my website for quite a while now, but after checking a friend's portfolio and reading more about TailwindCSS I decided to give it a go and this is what I came up with.
I got layout ideas from a few different places, the main layout was adapted from a theme I purchased (which I linked on the project's README), some parts were from other people's portfolios, and other parts I created and designed myself.
New website overview
To write the new website I decided to use three things I wanted to learn more about: Next.js with TypeScript and TailwindCSS. Those three were the main requirements, everything else was added afterward as I was working on the website.
I also decided to use a CMS for the blog content, and after some research, I decided to use Sanity. The things that got me interested in Sanity were: it has a free and self-hosted Open Source editor, it uses a very customizable Open Source library to render your content and it offers a free real-time content database, which means you don't need to have a server running to store your CMS API.
To deploy my website I decided to use Vercel. My original blog was also deployed on Vercel, however, since the new website is written with Next.js, Vercel offered a free and neat integration, offering real-time logging, analytics, and the ability to set a custom domain, all for free.
The entire website source code is public and available on my GitHub, feel free to check it out :)
lucasadrianof/personal-blog-nextjs