Introduction

I previously had a blog using Jekyll but I stopped blogging on it back in 2019 due to the lack of commitment and I didn't like working with its templating language to make my custom pages.

I needed a framework that used react.js as a means to write the layout of the pages. Back then it was Gatsby.js that I picked up and decided to deploy it to Now which was Vercel back in the day.

But again due to the lack of commitment, the blog dried up and sat in the closet for about 2 years.

Now that I'm currently working however I realized that I should've been more active in posting what I was learning since most of my friends who actively blogged were much more sought out by potential employers.

Most professional resources such as egghead.io also recommend making a blog for publicity and portfolio purposes. With those thoughts in mind, I figured that I needed to use and edit my old blog.

When I tried to set it up, however, I was swarmed with numerous issues found by Dependabot and the staleness of settings brought about a lot of headaches, especially because of the node version. I mean it was off for 2 years so there's that.

I could've fixed it but I wanted a place to write without having the issues of configuration at the moment. I thought about using another Gatsby.js starter but due to it being in the process of updating to V4 I was hesitant due to the extra configurations that will eventually come up.

It was then I looked up some boilerplates using react and came across the NextJS Tailwind starter blog.

I decided to make use of it because of the following:

It has dark mode builtin
Uses react.js
Tight integration with Vercel
The code is simple enough to extend.
To learn about NextJS

Because of the 4th point I am confident that I can change the theme or add functionalities to this blog.

I did encounter a problem during the blog's setup. Its a small issue on its Disqus configuration in Disqus.js.

// in siteMetadata its disqus configuration is named disqusConfig instead of disqus
script.src = 'https://' + siteMetadata.comment.disqus.shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'
script.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date())
script.setAttribute('crossorigin', 'anonymous') // Need to comment or remove the line below to fix Disqus CORS issue

Which can be fixed by changing the lines above to this:

script.src = 'https://' + siteMetadata.comment.disqusConfig.shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'
script.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date())

What I'll be writing from now on

My old blog/s used to have more posts about hardware using Arduino and the Raspberry Pi.

But recently I'm much more engrossed in the following:

Game Development using Unity (since I'm currently building 3D Games on the side as a Hobby)
Relearning React and Javascript (new Hooks API for a lot of libraries)
A bit of Java (since I'm working as a Java Developer at the moment.)

Side note

I also recently released a Tower Defense Game in itch.io which will be the focus of my topics in the succeeding days.