Creating a new package from based my frustations in Staticka.
A few months ago I nearly forgot that I have a blog page. The main reasons are either I'm just bad at writing paragraphs or just being focused on another project. To update this site, I will use this opportunity and as an excuse to upgrade Staticka by creating another package named Expresso.
Before I create Staticka, this portfolio page was previously built on a compiled Angular 1 project. While scrolling for the new and latest news in Hacker News, I discovered some static site generators (some also as a service) and it piqued my interest. The only static site generator that I know and use before is Jekyll and it was the time I published my first portfolio site in Github. I love its simplicity and ease of use then I think after if I can implement it on my known language (which is PHP). Inspired also by other generators such as Hugo and Sculpin, I decided to create my own static site generator named Staticka.
From there, I managed to create all of my pages, including the landing page of my projects and also for our family business Rouginsons. I also managed to create a terminal based package named Console for handling quick static HTMLs but unfortunately it stopped there. I have ideas on how to improve Staticka in that time but those ideas were not materialized and were forgotten.
Fast forward to now, while doing Windstorm and browsing to a landing page in one of my projects, I find the design (in which I did) uncomfortable in my eyes and decided to update. But I found that I'm having trouble in managing those pages. After searching for inspiration and improvements for Staticka, I decided to create a project named Expresso.
I also need to learn for my mistakes so I created a Trello board and post whenever ideas I put there so that it will not be forgotten. After creating a prototype for Expresso, I'm currently using it for managing pages in this portfolio site in order to find usability problems and also to improve Staticka. Before migrating the landing pages of my projects to Expresso, I need to find first a simple and pleasant documentation theme.
While doing Expresso, I almost forgot that my previous project Console have identical functionalities to it. Being frustated to its similarities, I decided to create a distinction between them. Although both are using Staticka as their core, I will create a goal for Expresso to have a user interface (like writing a blog post in Wordpress) for managing content with fixed components and directory paths while Console's goal is for flexibility in replacing core components (such as ContentInterface and RendererInterface).
It seems that I do get active when trying my own packages into real world scenarios. To continue this, I need to use more of it by breaking the projects if necessary, find inspirations to it if needed to, and fix my frustrations when I encounter it. I'm thinking of creating a content management system (CMS) on top of Staticka in the future but I'm not sure on how it works yet. Also I'm having fun when creating my own solutions, it gives me a deeper view on how certain things work and that knowledge may be useful in the future projects.