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How I Created This Blog

This blog is built using Docusaurus in blog-only mode. Here's how I did it:

  1. First I followed the default Docusaurus initialization guide: https://docusaurus.io/docs/installation

    1. npm i -D docusaurus

      Docusaurus does not mention actually installing dependencies, so it expects you to globally install it. I don't like globally installing packages, so I started with installing Docusaurus to my repo. I also added my own .gitignore file.

    2. npm init docusaurus

      I chose the common theme and the TypeScript language.

      You can see the changes from this step in commit 808a9aa.

  2. Then I added spellchecking, formatting, and some standard config files through my automation package virmator.

    This happened in commit 8b585bc.

  3. Then I customized it to my liking.

    1. To setup blog-only mode, I deleted the src and docs directories and set docs to false in docusaurus.config.ts.
    2. I added custom fonts, favicons, and app icons.
    3. I wrote a bunch of custom files in static/custom.css, mostly to remove parts of the Docusaurus that I didn't want.

    You can see the changes from this step in commit b85d12f.

  4. Lastly I pushed everything to GitHub and hooked it up to Netlify on this domain.

Ultimately I'm slightly disappointed in how hard it was to shoehorn my desired results into Docusaurus, but it's serving my purposes for now. I like building sites for the heck of it, so maybe someday I'll build my own version of a blog generator. (It would all be client-side too, no build process!)