Jeremy Heckt's Blog

Devlog: Writing My Own Website

I decided to write my own personal website. You can see it here: https://www.jeremyheckt.com. I wanted a central place where I could "advertise" myself. It would also convenient to be able to point everybody to the same URL if they wanted to read my writings.

An issue I came across initially is that I publish on several different websites, and I do not want to stop keeping those websites separate. The solution I decided on was to have my website read from a spreadsheet that contained all of my writings in order from newest to oldest. I did not want to manually update this as that is a huge pain...so RSS to the rescue!

Each of the main blogs I write on support RSS, so I have a Python script grab these, make a TSV, and save that file. This runs every hour via cron, a classic style. The website then reads this TSV file every time you go to https://www.jeremyheckt.com/writing. This creates the illusion of my website being the central location. I may play with blog posts getting a description page on my central site so I can provide those links as well.

One of the biggest pain points I had during the development process was making the site look good on mobile. iPad and desktop was fairly easy. However once I took the time to understand how tailwindcss works it was quite easy. The secret is that tailwindcss is mobile-first. What this means is that any class you give an object is going to be the default - you can give an object a class such as md:justify-center which means on screens medium size and above justify the content in the center. This is incredibly useful, as you can simply design the website to look good on a phone and then just add something like md: to make it pretty on other screens.

Overall this was fun, really fun. I will continue to work on this site as some of the information is a tad sparse. At least point I feel like I am pretty good at making Go based websites. I love it!