This is my first blog post. I spent a couple of hours over MLK weekend trying to figure out how to make a Django website that could host my blog. I followed a tutorial from Real Python to get the blog structure, and then made use of the Render documentation to deploy it. I have pretty much zero webdev experience but I tried to speedrun this to get something working as quickly as possible, without worrying too much about the details.
I am currently using my 2013 Macbook Pro to develop the app and this caused me a ton of issues with annoying things like Homebrew not working because my OS is so old (10.15.17 Catalina). This led to problems with pipx (which I only needed for installing Poetry, which I ultimately ended up solving by using the poetry installer and a bunch of different tries with pyenv and venv; that eventually worked, though not without a lot of frustration). My goal was to:
I later realized that perhaps building this in Django was overkill, since it looks like there are other static site frameworks that I did not know about, but found out about in the Render docs. However, the point of this was to learn how this stuff works, and I could've also just made a Substack or Tumblr, but that is not as much fun. I am going to try and post this and see if it even works. At the moment I don't even know if I can use markdown, how to embed links and the like.
Some Outstanding Questions and To Do's:
On Jan. 16, 2024 Adrien wrote:
markdown did not work :(
On Jan. 19, 2024 Adrien wrote:
markdown now kind of works
On Feb. 8, 2025 Adrien wrote:
Why didn't markdown work?