Start with the blog

The setup was really fast done in five minutes: Copy DDEV config and a composer.json from another project, start the container, installation-routine and the blog was up and running … almost.

The blog extension comes with Bootstrap-CSS. It's too heavy for just some styles in a simple page and it came from a CDN. Therefore I started overwriting the blog styles with my own ones. It also turned out that I had to overwrite some templates and the CommentFormFactory to apply my own stuff for Google reCAPTCHA. 

This site should be really cheap in costs because it is at first a test only. For reCATCHA I need the consent of the user. A consent tool like Usercentrics is too expensive and I don't prefer how it's working. I also don't want a big layer in front of the page nerving the user asking some consent stuff. So I created an opt-in in the place where reCAPTCHA is located in the form. To initialize the opt-in I had to modify the comment form template. But this is not as easy because the form extension generates the fields and sections and can't be overwritten.

Much more into the theme of building a blog now and not just testing around, I needed content blocks. To be able to have full control about the contents I do not prefer the built-in fluid_styled_content-elements. My solution for this is the brand new content_blocks extension, which will be part of the core in Typo3 v13. It's worth a visit and also worth to make another blog post.

I created the default elements like header, text, media, textmedia and also one for leaflet and one for code. There are some mods like processing the imagery in the optimised sizes for the frontend, generating a slider when there is more than one image, showing up GPX tracks in Open Street Maps, some layout variations, etc.

What is a blog without a search? The good old indexed_search is the choosen one. Reduced templates, new styles, …

Apropos styles. Do you know the typo3_vite extension? Live-development for templates, styles and script and easily build the assets.

At the end today there was much templating/style stuff to do. Fonts, colours, dimensions, spaces, navigation, etc. I'm a bit proud of setting this up in this short time. All is responsive, almost all dimensions raises from breakpoint to breakpoint, almost only the required stuff for a single page is loaded, image optimisation, … more work than one might think.

Now I'm a little bit happy about the result and go online with a good beta or a RC1.

That's not so easy to answer. I started with a test and want to make more of it. I no longer want to support the big blogging platforms like Facebook, Tumblr and other social media things. So I don't think the idea of having my own good old weblog is such a bad idea. All my accounts on Instagram, Twitter aka X, Facebook, etc. I killed two years ago. I went to the Fediverse and I learned that the Fediverse is really good but no social media is much better. It's fantastic how much time I gained for important stuff 😸.

I've been earning my living with web development for many years now and my main hobbies are bike packing and hiking. That will probably be the stuff you'll see here.

I've planned a big bike packing tour through Germany and The Netherlands which starts in a few weeks after the easter holidays when there is no frost at night. I hope to find time on the road to update this blog a bit. Maybe I can make some post about the planning and thoughts about it in retrospective. Time will tell.