When I started to learn R in 2017, I barely knew my way around website stuff beyond WordPress / Typo3. However, I knew enough HTML & CSS, and how to create maps and data visualisations, and how to run a statistical analysis. So I created a Hugo-based blog (with R‘s blogdown wrapper around pandoc and Hugo) where I blogged about DataViz, GIS / mapping and Data Science-ish workflows. Back then, it was the easiest way to get started with code-centric writing (at least for me), but it wasn’t necessarily the easiest to maintain.

Around 2019 I picked up JavaScript, started to build client-projects with eleventy (and jQuery), gained first experiences with React (2020), and Vue (2021), and eventually started to learn Svelte (2021). Svelte led to SvelteKit (2022), SvelteKit led to Astro, and here we are…

I didn’t blog since 2020, parts because I was coding full-time and time became scarce, parts because my blogdown-blog became unmaintainable and turned into technical debt.

[To be continued…]

Relaunch Goals

• blog more; write shorter “notes”
• ensure portability for new content (e.g. markdown)
• set up a convenient, non-IDE based way to write & publish
  • visual rich text / markdown editor
  • mobile-friendly editor (so that I can write from anywhere at any time)
  • easy asset management
  • (spellchecking)
  • …
• allow interactive elements (iframes / embeds; mdx)
• provide RSS feed
• incorporate / preserve old blog posts
• …

Approach

• Astro + markdown (+ mdx)
• Notion + Notion API as CMS
• asset management in Notion; image processing at build time with the native Astro Image integration and a little bit of Vite (blogpost incoming)
• tbc: Svelte for portfolio and for interactive features
• …