A new home for my thoughts

Greetings and welcome to my new personal website!

My previous website, jgrivera.dev, is originally hosted on Hashnode and I’ve always wanted to completely revamp it.

Ta-da! Here is the result of that :)

A couple of changes

I made a couple of changes to this new website.

Platform

This website now uses Astro and an incredible theme called Astro Cactus.

Using Astro for a project has been on the back of my mind since last year, I’m happy to have found a good use-case for it.

When I scouted for my new website’s next platform, I had a wishlist for it:

• I want to be able to write its posts directly from my code editor, preferably using Markdown.
• If I ever want to develop and provide customized experiences for it, I should be able to do so.
• I should be able to have great control and ownership (code, maintenance, deployment, etc.) of it.
• It should be SEO-friendly.

From all of these, I figured that Astro fitted the bill nicely. Using Astro also means using Node.js tooling, which is something I enjoy and I’m accustomed with too.

Like any typical Node.js project, I maintain this website in a Git repository. This gives me more control compared to using a third-party blog provider like Hashnode.

Branding

Apart from the new platform and tech, I also saw this new website as an opportunity to make my professional brand more consistent.

I started by standardizing my professional username to the one you see today — the new domain name! Back then, I tend to use jg-rivera and jgrivera depending on its availability (quite inconsistent, I know).

Even more so, the username with a dash is problematic. I first realized this when I tried generating a Spring Initializr project. One time, I wrote com.github.jg-rivera as my project’s group ID and then the moment I loaded it up in my IDE, it was bleeding red full of errors. Woops.

I also decided to get a different TLD for my website. I figured that .com is more common and cheaper to maintain than .dev so that’s a plus.

Onwards

I’m looking forward to write more of my thoughts in this new website. I’ll try to adopt a more casual tone in my writing as if I’m just speaking to you. It’s easier to write and I think I can get my thoughts and ideas across better.

I also intend to use this website to showcase some of my personal projects. I’m pretty excited about that since I can now dedicate a discussion for each of them.

I’ll also migrate some high quality posts from my original blog. I might improve some of them and add some new insights. I have learned a lot since then. Some old posts already made their way through here.

By the way, the old jgrivera.dev domain now redirects to this new website.

That’s all for now, cheers! :)