/logo2white.png Falk Schönfeld

Starting a blog

Hello! I'm glad you found your way to my blog, I just got to this point myself.

Who am I?

I am an electrical engineering and computer science student. I love to tinker with stuff. I love to program. I love to draw. I enjoy taking things apart to figure out how they work. Often I put them back together, sometimes they even work again. And on some notable occasions they even do work better than before I got my hands on them.

I like to sew. I love cooking, and eating even more. Making and building things is one of my favorite pastimes. I try to play instruments but usually fail in amusing ways.

I'm heavily into fantasy and science fiction, post-apocalyptic, dystopic stuff. If no one survives, the sequel cant be shitty. I play tabletop games from time to time, and DnD quite a lot.

I like metal music and a bit of everything. My playlist will usually chain hardstyle to Powerwolf to ABBA to Joan Baez to Nightwish to Sabaton. This blog will likely be similarly consistent in content.

Now why would I start a blog?

I hosted my first proper webpage roosandmoose.com (link now defunct) in 2018/19 to upload pictures from my adventures on a trip around the world with my girlfriend for our families back home. While I had experience with web design in several frameworks before, that was the first time I got into proper fullstack development, setting up a lamp stack and writing the entire thing in php. I took it offline when I got back, but I'm still up to no good.

This page will give you a small window into my antics. I plan to write about my projects, mostly repairing and making stuff. What do I hope to gain?

Designing a blog

Coding a blog

When you start a blog, you are first faced with an important question: How does this work?

While there are many pages online which offer website builders, I'm too curious about the workings behind this to just take some prefabbed stuff. Or at least I was. roosandmoose.com was written totally in php, and I dug up how to do everything myself. While I learned a lot, and still profit from the experience, it was a huge load of work and the end result was ... acceptable. Far from perfect, but it did the job.

I've also written pages in Ruby on Rails, something I consider the most overbuild web development framework I have ever seen. It takes care of everything for you, you just need to know what to tell it to take care of.

So this time around I first tried a slightly more lightweight middle way, looking into content management systems (CMS). I started off when I found picoCMS. While I liked the basic concept, somehow I missed features. The template engine was nice, so I switched over to Grav, a CMS written in php, with the same template engine called Twig.

The goal was to keep the code base slim and the amount of code I'm not willing to read to a minimum. At the same time I had good control over my layout and content and I could always write my own extensions for stuff I miss.

However... this didn't stay long. As I continued to bend Grav to what I had in mind, I found myself learning particulars of a framework, trying to force it to work in unintended ways. Since I also dislike php, I figured if I'm not going for an out of the box solution anyway I could just go back to Rails. While huge, I still like the internal structure, the MVC setup, integrated testing and most of all the ruby syntax. So somehow I went full circle, but at least I know a couple of more alternatives.

How the journey looked so far:

Of course the current state is only a beginning. I just wanted to get a basic page, Markdown interpreter and image upload running. Next will probably be an RSS feed, automated database backups, tags, and then maybe a comment section.

If you made it here and like it, let me know what you think.

Until next time, Falk