UPDATE
A few weeks ago I moved away form sveltekit and rewrote this blog in NextJS instead. I'll make a post eventually soon.
Branden Builds Branding
I am excited to announced that I have officially launched my new website and blog. This project gave me a chance to try out some new tech I've been eager to learn.
I reached out to a previous coworker and awesome friend, Mister Munn, who does phenomenal identity branding services.
The Website Stack
Sveltekit
I've been hearing the help on Svelte and was eager to try a new framework. I love React and Vue but always game to learn some new tech. I decided on Svelte after running through a tutorial and loved how easy and simple it was to include use popular frontend techniques like reactivity and routing.
I ran through Gatsby and loved it as well, which I used over at my digital nomad blog and didn't really have any complaints. I just honestly wanted to play with some new tech.
WindiCSS
WindiCSS is very similar to Tailwind as in it's built off Tailwinds utility first approach. The difference, which is why WindiCSS claims to be faster than Tailwind, is it is a standalone compiler for Tailwind that generates classes on demand.
mdsvex
If you're familiar with MDX, this is Svelte's version of this. I wanted to create my blog posts in markdown so I can have them on Github and anyone can edit and submit PRs on them. It also just seemed overkill to use a full on CMS like I did with my other blog.
Vite Image Tools
I wanted a tool similar to Gatsby Image that handles optimization, srcset, and other modern image techniques for my images. I found Vite Image Tools after looking around Discord and a Reddit post.
Pain Points
Image handling in svelte/svelte kit is not a great experience yet. The biggest issue for me, especially after being spoiled with GatsbyImage, is a way to dynamically use images in Vite Image Tools. Vite Image Tools is awesome, but uses an import statement which means no template literals so I have to hard code in each image for my blog. This is gonna be a focal point in the next iteration of my blog.