Why do i need a Blog?
Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot of stuff from cool Blogs and YouTube videos. People like Matt Estella with CGwiki, Konstantin Magnus or Junichiro Horikawa have shared their knowledge for free, which I’m incredibly grateful for. Now I’m standing here on the shoulders of giants and want to follow their example and share some of the stuff I learn, in hopes that some people might find it useful.
First step was finding a place to put this amazing wealth of important knowledge I’ve aquired. While sites like Substack or ArtStation can be used for this purpose, I wanted something I could control, customize, and truly make my own. This way, I have full control over the data and the system. I also want to make an effort to give less of my data to big cooperations (until it inevitably gets crawled by bots, that is).
I made this site using Astro, which was incredibly fun. Astro JS is a web framework designed for building content-focused websites. My last website was build using next.js which, while a great project to learn modern web Frameworks, was way to heavy and overkill for a simple blog and portfolio website. Astro on the other hand is really lightweight. It compiles markdown files to static html sites with no included JavaScript by default .
Some cool features are:
- automatic blog and project creation from markdown files
- fully static site search
- tag system
- minimal JavaScript (I use a photo viewer to Fullscreen images called viewerjs)
- LateX Support
markdown support for stuff like:
Headings
smaller Headings
even smaller headings
and cool Codeblocks ↓
// with syntax highlighting:
vector snapToAxis(vector input){
float lx = abs(input.x);
float ly = abs(input.y);
float lz = abs(input.z);
if (lx > ly && lx > lz){
return set(sign(input.x), 0, 0);
}else if(ly > lx && ly > lz){
return set(0, sign(input.y), 0);
}else{
return set(0, 0, sign(input.z));
}
}
“Quotes: Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather”
even Tables!!!!!
| Cool Tables | With Header |
|---|---|
| with rows | and columns |
and all of it was developed in a week. (not really, i stole a lot of it from some presets to be fair).
While there’s still some stuff to be done and learned, and I’ll continue to experiment with colors, fonts, and layouts, I now have a solid website that will hopefully last for years.
If I don’t forget or get distracted, I plan to write about some cool projects I want to showcase, like this implementation of an SPH fluid solver in Houdini:
