First post. Hello!

This blog is still WIP but I figured I might as well start working on the posts since :

1. Good content is what makes a blog good and,
2. I need to see if everything is looking fine in terms of the UI

Anyway, hi :3 This post will be kind of disorganized since I haven't thought about what I want to say here. I'll just vaguely describe my process. Let me start from the beginning.

Why I made this blog

I started learning React back in May of this year and this video inspired me to try building my blog. I knew it would take more than 7 days for me since I'm a noob, I was ready to put in the time and effort to make it. Spoiler alert: I failed at it :/ Though I couldn't do it then I still was determined to make it before the end of this year.

Fast forward to a few months, I had a bit more experience and was more confident with the concepts. I also happened to watch a few videos of Gatsby by Net Ninja and I found it super easy to follow and thought I could try building my Blog using it since it makes the process a lot easier.

Initial Layout and Ideas

I was looking for inspiration on a much of sites and found a lot of cool designs. But I wanted to do something unique. Also, I wanted to build it without using a CSS framework like Bootstrap since I want to get better at responsive design (and also thanks to my masochistic tendancies when it comes to web dev). Double also, I wanted to use CSS Grid. I had a basic idea of it but I never build anything with it I didn't know how to use it properly.

So, something unique + Grids...hmmmmm I finally came up with idea of using nEwsPaPeR theme. I made a rough wireframe on my notebook and built all the components. I was happy since it was looking exactly how I imagined it. So I showed it to a couple of people aaaaaand they didn't like it.

This was kind of shocking to me because I thought it was a good idea (now I see why everyone disliked it, it had too much text and no colors making it look like an interesting textbook). I asked more people and gave me similar feedback. So I decided to resign everything since I wanted to prioritize user experience over my personal preference.

It was super frustrating to change the UI and choose good colors but Im glad I did because I definitely like the new design better as I can use more colors. Special thanks to my friend who gave me helpful suggestions and criticisms.

What I Learnt

I didn't know much about GraphQL and Gatsby and I wanted to learn as I go. Whenever I did get stuck, I found the official documentation very helpful (in spite being someone who hates reading documentation). Youtube tutorials and a bunch of blogs online also helped. So thankss everyone. Having worked out most of the functionality, I have a much better understanding and I love GraphQL. Also, I discovered Styled components while working on this and it is so convient. I will definitely be using it more in my future projects :D

More stuff to do

I don't know what else to put in here, I think I have covered everything. I still need to do a lot of stuff, this is taking way longer than I expected. Pending stuff to deal with :

• Add Tags and make the user to be able to sort posts by tags
• Complete About page
• Refine the UI
• Add SEO component
• Write posts :')

If you read so far, thanks. Back to work now :3