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+---
+layout: blog
+title: "Dev Diary #1: Look mom!"
+description: "I originally intended this project to die"
+date: 2023-11-16
+tags: dev-diary
+---
+
+Time travel back to February 2nd, 2022. That was the first major delay I made while I was working on this blog. I created a draft post regarding how to build a discord bot- scratch that, I didn't even make a tutorial, it's literally just the metadata and that's it.
+
+![The first few commits done towards the repository](../assets/2023-11-25-dev-diary-1-firstcommits.png "The first few commits done towards the repository")
+
+After that, I left the repository alone for more than a year, left it to rot, unlinked, and looking ugly as heck. I did it injustice.
+
+That is until today.
+
+I looked back at my repository list in GitHub again, and hey, at the bottom of it, the `blog` repo. I had nothing else to do today, so I thought to myself: "Why not breathe life again into this project?", and so I did.
+
+## Stage 1: Cleanup
+
+There were some remains of the old setup left that cluttered the repository, so I deleted them all, including the skeleton "make a discord bot" post. I also had a lot of cross-repository resource sharing that really messed with styling on this site, especially after I reworked the main root site before this.
+
+There's also a teeny-tiny issue that I have, I don't know anything about Jekyll, or Liquid.
+
+## Stage 2: Learning
+
+Markdown was the easy part, Jekyll was as easy as looking at the docs, Liquid, however, was the part that irritated me. Being an avid user of [MediaWiki](https://mediawiki.org), I am very accustomed to brackets, brackets everywhere. I thought if I did another thing other than editing wikis, I would have a break from this hell.
+
+Nope.
+
+```liquid
+{% for post in site.posts %}
+  <li class="post-link">
+  <a href="/blog{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a> (<span class="post-tags">{{ post.tags }}</span>) - <span class="post-date">{{ post.date | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}</span></li>
+{% endfor %}
+```
+
+And worst of all, Liquid behaves differently from what I am used to. Fortunately, ChatGPT is here to help, after some extremely basic courses through the chatbot, I was able to create some pretty OK Jekyll and Liquid setup. It was pretty nice.
+
+## Stage 3: Rebuilding
+
+Rebuilding everything from scratch. Includes, layouts, templates, assets, everything had to be remade. I started with boilerplating my CSS, created a semantic HTML layout, then the includes like the header and footer.
+
+One of my main gripes is responsiveness, my main site, as of the time of this writing, is NOT responsive, it's such a shame. And I remade my main site many more times than this one. I realised one of the big things for creating a responsive layout is to let the browser do its scaling, I don't even need to set up fancy stuff like viewport units, just good design practices (that came from unfruitful experiences).
+
+I also prioritised user experience as to keep myself from getting headaches as well, line heights are expanded, content width is lessened but not to the point of an [anorexic article](https://web.archive.org/web/20231102072430/https://visitandorra.com/en/visitor-information/before-you-arrive/passport-visas-customs/) (visit the site in a mobile viewport and you'll see what I mean), and heading sizes are enlargened.
+
+## Stage 4: Republishing
+
+When everything is fine again, it was time to publish my first proper blog post: {% post_url 2023-11-16-test %}. It was simple but it's honest work.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+It was a fun excercise, and I finally finished my project. Even though I almost left it to die, at least I have a place to write in the future.