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Mark vd Sman
Mark vd Sman

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Advice requested for my blogging method

Hello all,

First off, I'd like to say I'm happy to write my first post on here! In the short time I've been here, I noticed how great of a community this is and I hope to become actively involved!

So, to get to the point: I'm planning on starting to blog about some of my own projects and just general subjects that I'd like to learn more about and how I would apply it to a dataset. This was initially planned as a personal, private thing, but I noticed that it's handy to gain some online presence. As these things can easily be combined, why not just do it eh?

I wrote a few basic posts to try out what is possible on GitHub pages and now I feel confident enough to show you all my first setup of my site. It's nowhere near how I would like to have it in the end, but I would like to have some feedback and advice on its current state. Also, I don't think I'll keep the current site title, but we'll see down the road...

One of my biggest doubts is how I show my readers the used code: right now, I have a sort of spoiler element that hides the code until the user clicks on it. I chose for this method to increase readability of the posts themselves. Here is an example of my latest post.

Of course I'll have to do some manual editing when trying to publish the same posts to other platforms like Dev.to using Atom, since the spoilers are not imported very well. In these cases, I figured to just keep the standard method of showing code chuncks between paragraphs.

So, what is your approach and what is your opinion on how I decided to structure my posts?

PS: any feedback on other things are also very much appreciated!

Latest comments (2)

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sethlilly profile image
Seth Lilly • Edited

Welcome to the community, Mark! As a technical reader, I'd actually prefer your code snippets to be expanded. It's also helpful when search engines pick up your page for reference. Another developer stopping by to see a code example will find it much easier if it's not hidden behind a click function.

Ali Spittel (@aspittel ) just published a post about blogging as a developer, you should check it out: dev.to/aspittel/blogging-as-a-deve...

Good luck with the new blog!

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mvdsman profile image
Mark vd Sman • Edited

Hey Seth,

Thank you for your welcome and feedback! My main concern was indeed whether or not people would rather scan the page and immediately see the code when specifically looking for some solution or if they would be bothered by having a lot of paragraphs being separated by code.
But it does make sense to have it expanded yes.

I do like it for some reason, so maybe I'll find some other use for them in the future (also spent quite some unnecessary amount of time on the spoilers:) )