Hello World v.2

Well, this is exciting. My very first post using the custom blogging/authoring framework that I've been working on for the last few weeks. Of course, just like any other blog that I've ever had, I have no real idea what I'm ever going to do with this one. I'm just sort of hyped that I'm actually, I think, able to write/save/view a post using an app that I've written completely from scratch.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a senior developer by all rights, but that's having worked my way up from being an intern, so it feels different not having a legacy code-base to work from. All decisions are mine, and that's totally new. That and the fact that this is one of the first applications I've ever made available to the public eye. Actually, if you don't count the half-formed NodeJS "Wild Magic" tool that I wrote once for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, or the "occasionally functional" Discord bot that I wrote for the ill-fated Shadowrun campaign, then this might actually be the first.

To be real, I'm not even sure that I'm going to keep this post up for all that long. It's kind of a test post just to get a feel for how this goes, and the general UX of the thing. But also because I want to work on a way of displaying recent posts on the home page, and a way to navigate to them from the navbar, and both of these things require some actual data to work with. All the other test posts were short lived "insert, edit, delete" tests of my database connection.

That's also something interesting about this: I'm writing this from the development version of the app running in Debug mode on my laptop, but it should be pushing to the production database and thus available from the actual site (even if there are no menus there to easily navigate to or find it after I click "submit post" below.

Some Technical Info:

• Posts can be written in Markdown, which I prefer for a few reasons. Namely, I just like the readability of raw markdown, and it's how I write posts for the other blog (but that one is running Pelican and builds a static site using python. Thanks for the idea, Gwern)
• Posts can be written in-app instead of in a separate/secondary file which then gets parsed into html
• Posts are saved to a database instead of a file on the server
• The markdown is rendered to HTML using the Markdig library/NuGet package
• The application is written in C# using AspNetCore and .Net8
• This has been an opportunity to learn a lot more about the MVC framework and general design patterns, and to really get comfortable with it

Hopefully none of that exposes any potential attack vectors... But realistically, I don't have much of value on this server in the first place. It's just a code playground for me, and a FoundryVTT instance for the CyberpunkRED game that I still haven't gotten around to running.