New Website!

I have been thinking of writing a WordPress theme for the blog I had and I noticed that there were too many extensions, too many externally loaded files and trying to fix all of that would have taken me forever. I decided to take that as an opportunity to create something simple and nice with Django & React.

The Backend

Built with Django REST Framework which makes providing a set of API endpoints pretty straightforward. These endpoints are mostly to fetch data from a PostgreSQL database or add/delete entries if a token is provided. The authentication is handled by Knox & is used to provide a simple dashboard so I can manage the content I have on my blog.

The Frontend

From configuring Webpack to produce what I want to write CSS, it was the most challenging part of the project. I ended up using Bulma as a CSS framework which worked out pretty nicely! One thing I wanted to make sure of is to have the smallest bundle possible and avoid loading any external resources. I have replaced the externally loaded Google fonts with the Inter Typeface family ❤️ and distributed the JS into smaller chunks that are loaded only when used, bundled the few SVG icons I used instead of FontAwesome, removed the unused locales of moments.js and uglified the exported files.

I will try to write soon about the technical challenges I had to deal with and hopefully, the new blog will help with that!

Until then, enjoy the new spyware-less blog and stay safe :)