It all initially started with the idea that I wanted to be able to write my own articles on my own blog.

The benefits:

1. I get to suffer trying to implement something I wouldn’t have needed to if I just stuck to Medium and Dev.to like the rest of y’all
2. I get to have a project that is complete and actually get to use very often which has always been my aim since I started my learning.
3. Why not?

I know haters already want to ask how many projects I actually get to use. Well, shocker: 90% of them. Every new project up to this point has been something I really wanted to build or something I needed to accomplish a task. I cannot emphasize enough how fulfilling the experience has been! Truly a breeze.

The month is around November and I have decided it’s now or never. Like almost every other new dev on the block, I search around and discover that the word Django has more correlation to Blogs than anything else you can uncover about it in a five-minute deep dive.

Guess what? The boy finds he is in luck because up until that point he has been fiddling with Python a lot thanks to Web Scraping and the personal portfolio he managed to build a few months back that runs on this framework. Building it is an absolute breeze due to the plethora of YouTube tutorials and Stack Overflow questions that manage to answer about any question you might have on building blogs specifically using Django.

About a fortnight later I have my new shiny blog hosted on Vercel with posts stored on a Railway Postgres database. I could have never been happier. Or so I thought at the time; as with every other time 🥲.

I proceed to write an new post on my blog and quickly realize that I have an unanticipated challenge; the posts have to be written in HTML. So I have to write plain HTML just to get my thoughts out?? I don’t think so. Thanks to the blessing of the internet bestowed upon us by the U.S. Deparment of Defense , Tim Berners-Lee or whoever you have in mind, I get to discover a glorious invention: the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor.

The premise behind it is that it lets you create and format content like text, images, and links; just like you would in a word processor. Instead of writing code, you see the final result as you edit, making it child’s play to design pages without needing to know HTML or CSS. Cool, right? 😏

After wrestling with it for hours and periods of existential crisis in between, I finally got it working. The joy? 👌.

After several hours of struggle and trying different options I finally nail it and it’s pure bliss!

At this point I feel that’s it and dive right into writing posts avidly because I get to write them on my own creation. What else could I possibly want, right? And behold, the first version of Blogzzly ever.