No CMS. My blog Bare-Bone start

But why, though?

• They say blogging is part of “advertising yourself” as a developer. So… I guess I’m doing a blog then.
• My goal is to help myself land job opportunities—and maybe this can also double as a portfolio.
• I’m a freelancer, so maybe a potential client might get impressed.
• I kind of like the idea of creating content for the public.
• Coding my own stuff—like this blog—feels interesting and fun.

I’m going to host my blog on Neocities. I’m not a hipster or some old-school tech romantic, but I like the simplicity of it. The free tier only gives me limited space for static files, which means I’ll only add tools and resources when I actually decide to use them. One step at a time.

Picking a Theme

The first thing is to decide on a theme.

Honestly, I’m not super passionate about writing on any specific topic. This blog will probably become a mix of different types of posts. Still, I want to have at least one main theme.

I’ve decided: “A blog about its own development.”
That way, I not only get to build the blog itself, but the development itself becomes content.

I kill two birds with one codebase.

About the Use of AI

Let’s address the AI elephant in the room.

I’m not paying for any premium models like ChatGPT-4 or similar services. Any help from AI will come from free-tier tools. Also, I like to understand what I’m doing—so I’ll only ask AI to generate parts of the code I already understand, rather than asking it to do whole tasks. And yes, I’ll test everything.

Don’t blindly trust AI—or anything, really.

Deciding on a Layout

After poking around the web for inspiration, I came up with the following layout:

To implement it, I’ll use Bootstrap—because it’s simple and I know the basics. Full disclosure: I’m not great with CSS.

This next images shows in general how I’m using Bootstrap to build the layout:

Here’s what my blog looks like right now:

If it doesn’t look like that when you’re reading this, that means I’m making progress! I’ll be using Git and GitHub to version-control everything, so the blog’s past won’t be lost.

What’s Next?

There’s still a lot to do:

• Add a comment section (doesn’t exist yet),
• A database to store comments,
• Some way to validate users (maybe email verification),
• A database for blog posts…

And that’s just the normal stuff.

I’m also planning to add a bunch of totally unnecessary things that a blog definitely doesn’t need—just for fun (and for content, of course):

• Maybe some mini-games,
• Embedded code editors for live testing (you’ll see what I mean),
• Whatever wild ideas come to mind.

The sky’s the limit.

Maybe the subtitle of this blog should be:
“A Place for Over-Engineering.”
What do you think?