Remember how I proudly proclaimed that I'm done with Wordpress and moved this blog to Astro? Well, that didn't last very long. I still think that Astro is great but it feels like it's better suited for marketing websites and maybe web apps than blogs. The one thing that got me in the end was the fact that I did not manage to create a proper RSS feed with images and other bells and whistles.
Be that as it may, and at the risk of becoming one of those people, I spent the last couple of days building everything from scratch using Kirby and I couldn't be happier. It provides me with the wished for flexibility while at the same time offering quite a few easy affordances that I didn't even know I was missing.
I'm writing these words in my new admin panel, for example. It't not just some run-of-the-mill panel, no, it's very easy to build your own little dashboards and custom views.
But that's not everything. One reason for me to switch away from Wordpress was to use a codebase I can actually wrap my head around. Kirby uses PHP, which was new to me, but after a few "Hey ChatGPT, what does this do in PHP?" sessions, I was able to wrap my head around it. All of this is important to me, because I want this to become more of a digital garden than "just" a blog.
The library is one aspect of it. It should not only be its own thing, somewhere off to the side, I want my books to be interwoven with my thoughts. Let's say I once again start talking about stoicism and want to point you to my favorite book on the topic, here it is:
If you're reading this in a browser, you see a custom made element just for books from my library. If you're reading this in your RSS reader, you see a link to the book. Perfection. Here, have a couple more:
But that's not all! I also build a custom element for callouts with the ability to select any emoji my heart desires. I don't know when I'll need this but it's good to have and was a perfect practice for learning how to create blocks in Kirby.
Neat, right?
You're also now able to click on tags to see all posts about that topic. That's not very relevant for now, since the number of posts is still relatively modest, but we'll get there.
For now, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed (it contains all posts and books!) in a reader of your choice and make sure to drop by the actual site from time to time, because it's what we Germans call an Augenschmaus.