Today, Monday April, 6th, marks the start of the third week at home during the COVID-19 quarantine, or shelter-in-place, whatever you want to call it. The wife and roomies and I have been getting along well, each doing our own separate things all under one roof; except for Joe, he remains busy in the lab with an antibody project targeting the Covid-Virus.

I have been spending many hours learning how to code this website, and I have now spent almost three days working through the Gatsby YouTube tutorial by Andrew Mead. I have a strange tendency to get fixated on a project when something really grabs my attention, and I find myself working on this project until midnight many nights. Tinkering with the code, figuring out how the commands change the final product.

Here's a picture of my work space in the basement.

When I was first going to make a site, I found a video that broke down standard HTML coding. While I understood most of the syntax, as well as linking styles with '.css' sheets (cascading style sheets), the number of <div>'s quickly got overwhelming. (you can think of a <div> like a single object that gets organized on the page, or inside of another object). The final site organization depends on how you sort all the objects, and objects inside of objects, on the page using the '.css' sheets. It can get very tricky!

Condensing the code using Javascript and Gatsby was more complex at first but is overall more streamlined. It has really cool tricks to make a great site that can be updated easily. For example, I can type this post and then trigger an update from a web browser anywhere in the world, without needing access to the source code on my laptop. Well that's not entirely true, I could download my site repository (the place you store your code) from GitHub, download "Visual Studio Code", edit the repository, and finally use my logins to re-upload a new source to Github. However, it's much easier to just change the source-code from my computer.

Today's updates are nearly all behind the scenes, but they are very useful to me for when I want to update the content on an individual page sans this blog. There is another type of file called 'Markdown' in which you can write new text and specify the formatting via code snippets that you want to show up on the page. I've linked each of my pages in the site directory to have a markdown file for each. Then when I want to update content that is not the blog (remember that's sourced from the web-app Contentful), all I have to do is edit the Markdown file and push it to the server. The new edits and formatting are automatically populated on the page.

Coming up next, I will be updating my website to include a photo gallery about my life. Should be fun. Keep up to date with the changes that are going to be coming soon!

Remember, it's not the price, it's the principle.

Lots of Love,

Eric