How I built this blog.

I have always wanted to start a blog, but I was too busy with my life (mostly school) to do it. However, I realized that blogging has a lot of benefits to the writer more so than the reader. Blogging helps to learn and understand better about the subject. It also helps to share knowledge with other people.

So here I am, starting my first blog.

Lets start with how I created this blog. But before that we need to understand what Deno is.

What is Deno?

As per the website, Deno is a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly that uses V8 and is built in Rust.

This website explains why Deno is different from Node.js. But the most important part in the website is the paragraph below.

What makes Deno so different from the ever popular Node.js is how it manages dependencies. Node.js uses a package manager like npm or yarn to download third-party packages from the npm registry into a node_modules directory and a package.json file to keep track of a project's dependencies. Deno does away with those mechanisms in favor of a more browser-centric way of using third-party packages: URLs. Deno uses ES modules, the same module system used in web browsers. A module can be imported from an absolute or relative path, as long as the referenced script exports methods or other values.

Why is it relevant to this blog?

This blog uses Deno. In fact it uses a package called deno_blog which is a simple blog generator that renders markdown files into HTML. You just need a single javascript file to get started.

Here is an example. This is the code that generates the blog.

The above code is the only piece of code needed to generate the very website you are seeing. If you don't believe me, look at the source code here.

How to deploy?

Here comes the insane Deno deploy. Deno deploy uses Google's V8 engine to run Deno projects at the edge, worldwide. I don't really know what this means at this point of time but it sounds pretty damn cool! The deploy step for Deno only takes 10 seconds! This is vastly different from projects that use Node.js as the build step takes way longer than that. Deno achieves this by using Just-In-Time Compilation. A detailed write up about this is here.

Conclusion

Deno is awesome! Built this website in less than a hour due to the simplicity of deno_blog. If this excites you, they also released Fresh recently. Check it out if you are interested.