Ben Patterson

New Start to The Blog

Sep 4, 2017

I’m rebooting the blog. The old entries are still around and may find there way back with some appropriate edits. For now, it’s best if I get a fresh start and archive the old stuff.

I’ve made quite a few changes to the site since I was last writing on a regular basis. The biggest is that I’ve stopped using markdown as an input method. WYSIWYG is an option so, I might as well take advantage of it.

Here are some other things that I’ve done to the site.

Added SSL (using Let’s Encrypt)
Turned the site into a single page app . Is it a single page app if there’s different implementations for the admin and public facing app?
Added a React app for my admin panel
Created a Vue app for the public facing site
Got over my impulse to do everything from scratch and started using some pre-made bootstrap templates . They weren’t built to work with Vue, and there are still some broken features but I’m working on that.
Switched to Flask for the backend framework .
Added tests against the api . It was a pain getting those to work with Google App Engine

I’ve still got plenty of cleaning up to do. Overall, I’m pretty happy with being able to get started using React, Vue, and Flask. It’s been a great learning experience. Hopefully, I’ll find the motivation to write some longer technical posts on the process. The code is all on github if you want to look.

– Update July 2020 —

I undid all of the above and switched to a simple jekyll site. I still like all the above technologies but a personal site that doesn’t always get maintained is not a good use case for them.