Thanks, Kagi

For those that don’t know about Kagi, it’s a new premium Search Engine on the block. Premium as in it costs, and at time of writing, I am considering paying for it. The fundamentals of the service is to return the internet back to a place with fewer ads, and more control. Kagi offers a lot of tooling to adjust results for your own needs, such as removing Pinterest from your search results 💆. A quote from the founder himself sums this up:

“With Kagi and Orion, we’re striving to build better ways to experience the web, ways that are safe yet fun for everyone, including my own kids.”— Vladimir Prelovac

After being inspired by Kagi’s recent blog post promoting content from the “small web,”, I decided to try create a blogging system and write this, my first blog post 😊. I’m quite keen on the concept of dogfooding, so this post will be used as a general test of this blogging system too.

Writing a blog post seemed pretty daunting at first, but I generally thought “fuck it” and started writing. In the end, I think it is a great avenue to share ideas and knowledge with the world (well, potentially… if those Search Engines surface this). Whether it’s about a recent event, a personal experience, or even a tutorial on coding, a blog post allows you to connect with readers, build a community, and most important, sharing of knowledge.

So, what could be a better way than to get started with a “Hello World” kind of post! In programming, “Hello World” is often the first program a beginner writes to understand the basics. Similarly, this blog post serves as my introduction to the world of blogging. Though I’ll also take the opportunity to go over a little on how this blog was created as part of the post. Going forward, I hope to use this platform to share my thoughts, ideas, and knowledge with others. Could generally be anything that I have done that I think could contribute to the “small web” and hopefully contribute back some value.

Azure CDN from Akamai Retire

Part of this move was also driven from the fact that Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) was so kind to retire the Azure CDN from Akamai offering 🙃

My previous website/portfolio was last updated back in 2017, where I moved to using Angular. I also looked into hosting more in the Cloud directly, as previously I was using some kind of VPS and just didn’t want to bother with maintaining the VPS. So I opted for an Azure Blob + Azure CDN approach as it even came out to be completely free at the time. I can’t remember when, but something must have changes as I did start getting billed. Though we’re talking pennies.

Working at BESTSELLER has exposed me to a Digital Asset Management system. Where I get to spend most of my time thinking about how Digital Assets should make their way around the business. During this, I spent quite some time looking through different CDN providers; from Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare etc. What came out best? Bunny CDN (now called bunny.net) (affiliate link) which was seemingly better in terms of latency and waaay cheaper than alternative options. Fastly had great systems in place for IaC (Infrastructure as Code) if you wanted to maintain things that way. Though for us, we just wanted to put a CDN in front of an Origin and would rarely be re-configuring things in the CDN itself.

Since Bunny CDN has been working well for a larger project than this measly portfolio/website/blog thing. I thought I’d replace the Azure CDN from Akamai part for Bunny CDN.

New Tech Baaaby

As I mentioned, my last iteration of the portfolio was based on Angular. Back in 2017, I was pretty clued up on Angular. Though since then, I have solely used React.js for my own projects and for work. This kind of meant I’d have to either upgrade Angular and re-learn some things or consider another option. I’ve worked a lot with Next.js which really is great to work with. It’s got a well defined/structured folder approach, documentation is great, and deploying is pretty damn easy.

So Next.js it is? Nope. One thing I wanted to do was to do this Blog thing, inspired by the Kagi post I touched upon earlier. Doing this in Next.js would have involved a whole bunch of work trying to find the Markdown files, use some other packages to render it, and so on.

Well then, what was the choice? Astro. I knew I wanted a Static Website ✅ That I could re-use my React knowledge ✅, and that had support for Markdown ✅. I’ve hit the Astro website a few times, and have been looking for an opportunity to try it out after a lot of generally good feedback. When I read about the Astro 3.0 release, and all the great improvements, especially “Astro View Transitions”. I know this was the best option to replace the current site. Though I haven’t actually sought out using any React components for the website so far, which really helps with the performance of the site in general.

Astro certainly has some differences, in how the files are structured for example, with the fences --- which look odd at first but are otherwise harmless. Kind of makes it feel like C++ where you have the header and the source, though still completely different. If you have the time, I’d really suggest trying out Astro to build something simple. As always, it’s nice to see different ideas/viewpoints of how to set up or configure a code base. Can be inspiring for your own projects.

That’s all for now

Well, I guess in conclusion, I want to thank Kagi for inspiring me to start writing my own blog posts and for promoting content from the “small web”. I guess also thanks to Azure CDN from Akamai for retiring and sending me down this journey to rework this website/porfolio. In the end, writing can be a powerful tool for self-expression and for connecting with others, and I hope to use it to make a difference. So, stay tuned for more posts (unless I forget about this), and until then, hello goodbye world!