Let’s try this again

Wow, I’m back…again.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post, yet it’s been on my mind for some time. To be honest, I feel like my journey has been on pause for a while…for no fault other than my own discipline running dry and I stopped looking to code as much as I was.

But you know what never left? The guilt that I /wasn’t/ coding. I think it’s because I knew that I should be developing my skills and working towards that web developer job but I just kind of stopped.

Regardless, I wanted/needed to get back into it. The fact that my itch to become a Web Developer hasn’t left is a huge sign to me that it’s truly my passion. In my absence I still read about it, still watched videos about it, and still did some coding here and there - I even created my future wedding website!

Onto the building from scratch…

You may have seen my last post, Simple Ways To Build Your Own Blog, in which I built a blog using Stackbit. That was quick and easy and works really well! However, then I stopped writing, again. So as time went on and my itch for writing came back I couldn’t get the idea out of my head to create my own blog site from scratch…so here we are!

With the idea of starting anew I wanted to create something clean, simple, modern, and performant - this is also how I want to treat my dive back into my journey. I wanted to simplify my design ideas and color palette as well. I see a lot of minimal websites and love the look and feel, so that’s where I started.

So what did I use to build the site? Good old HTML and CSS - There’s nothing much more minimal than those! I’ll likely implement some light JS in the future but there’s no need to bog the site down unnecessarily.

Technologies out of the way, I wanted to pick a color palette and I used Coolors to help me out. The “Tea Green” #C2EABD and “Oxford Blue” #011936 were paired together and I loved them right away…to be honest they give me some Game Boy Color Palettes vibes. From there I made a couple of edits and used just 5 colors across both dark and light themes.

Color palette and technologies decided, it was time to get going on this build!

Building, Styling, and Finalizing

Building the blog didn’t take long at all - it’s dead simple, after all. I started with the homepage, followed by the about page, then the blogs page. That’s it, just 3 pages!

Keeping the simple and clean approach in mind, it really made creating the layout quite easy. There’s nothing new or special to my site, but it’s built and designed how I like it, hopefully you’ll all like it as well!

Throughout the building process I had little styling ideas here and there to make the site a little less plain, but again, it’s a pretty simple design and site. No frills and a bigger focus on the content.

I tested the site on multiple different browsers including Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox on both my 2012 MacBook Air and my desktop PC using 27” 4k monitors. I also tested it on several mobile devices including iPhone 6s, iPhone XS, iPhone 11 Pro Max, and a Samsung A50. Keeping it simple made responsiveness simple, a nice perk!

I also used a slightly modified version of Andy Bell’s CSS Reset. I’ve mentioned this before but it’s just a solid little file that makes building pages so much nicer.

Future Improvements

Moving forward I have just a few ideas to bring more to Coding Catchup. Those things include:

• An actual logo
• Theme toggle
• Email subscription form
• Implementing a CMS

And that’s it! Thanks for reading my foray back into blogging (again) and re-igniting the journey to my first Web Developer job. Feel free to check out Coding Catchup and let me know what you think!

Link Dump:

• Simple Ways To Build Your Own Blog
• Stackbit
• Coolors
• Game Boy Color Palettes
• Andy Bell’s CSS Reset
• Coding Catchup