Setting up this Blog

While any ordinary person could have gone for a more mainstream blogging platform like Wordpress as mentioned in an earlier entry, you’d probably be wondering how I ended up in this kind of a set-up.

Well, I could get started with the story about how I set up all this, of course, but let me begin a little bit earlier. I’ve kept blogs on Wordpress.com, and left them forgotten after I’ve stopped making new entries on them. A few months back, the news about Wordpress(.com) making content they host available for AI training (as made official in this post) made me revisit my old blogs and prevent third-party sharing before taking them all down. The end result of all this is make me wary of using Wordpress.com for my blogs.

Meanwhile, a good friend of mine has been enthusing me about this new thing called Astro, and keeping me up-to-date with his adventures as he tries it out. He also talked to me about Vercel but all this just flew over my head. I told him that maybe I’d understand more if I give it a try.

And now, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to try it all out. So, how did I manage to set this up? Not alone, that’s for certain.

I did try setting it up on my own, but unfortunately, having no experience at all with such technologies, I‌ failed miserably, mistaking a write-up for fairly experienced users as a how-to guide for setting things up and stopping when I encountered a step which asked me to make some changes to my (Astro) configuration file. I‌ thought it prudent to just give it a rest and resume some other time, perhaps after some more reading.

Later on that day, my friend asked me about my progress. I‌ told him about what happened and asked me if I want to start from scratch, to which I said “yes, by all means!”

Before we start, I must make one thing clear. This is not meant as a guide to setting up a themed Astro blog to GitLab and deployment via Vercel. With that out of the way, this is where we finally begin.

Set-up Git and Node for my system. This has already been done ages ago for other purposes, but I had to sort out some kinks in my Node configuration that might cause me some trouble before proceeding with the rest.
Set-up Astro. In my case, I ran the set-up command for my theme, which looked like this:
```
npm create astro@latest -- --template kirontoo/astro-theme-cody
```
I then had to upload this to my GitLab account. This gave us a bit of trouble, as some missteps were made. Some of these missteps include:
- forgetting to commit to the (local) repository after setting things up (step 2)
- forgetting to set-up the necessary SSH keys for my Git to connect to my GitLab account (supposedly part of step 1).
After that, it’s as ‘simple’ as entering the following command:
```
git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:account-name/repository-name.git
```
It’s only as simple as that given all the set-up done at step 1. Future changes can then be uploaded via a git commit command.
Then, I deployed this GitLab project via Vercel. To do that, I went to Vercel’s site and doing the following
- Add new project
- Adjust any options presented in the next screen. There’s really no need to do this in my case, so I went ahead to the next step.
- Click the deploy button to start deploying.
Of course, it didn’t go perfectly smoothly. I had some problems with the deployment due to some earlier misstep involving pnpm which somehow got involved in my earlier set-up. Fortunately, all I had to do is to delete some files, make another commit to and push the changes to the repo and check the deployment if it succeeded. And fortunately it did.
Now, I realized that the project name I gave back at step 3 propagated all the way to the deployment stage, and is now reflected on the subdomain name I have for my blog. That’s no good as I basically thought “this is a blog I‌ made via astro, and so I’ll name it astroblog!” Apparently dozens or so people have thought the same, and that’s just those who deployed it via Vercel! Fortunately, there’s a way to change that, and I did.
And then I realized that I left a lot of the theme placeholders in, and had to remove them all, and replace what needs to be replaced. So I did just that and did another commit and this time, Vercel automatically deployed the changes.

And that’s it! That’s how I set-up this blog. I expected it to be a project that’d take me at least a weekend or two, but I managed to complete it all in just one day.