How I Built My Personal Blog Using Lite Blog - A Laravel Blog Generator

I am thrilled to write my first post here and I will start by going through the development process of building this blog and how it became a Laravel project.

Building on Jigsaw

I started building the first version of this blog with Jigsaw. Jigsaw is a static site generator for Laravel developers. I used the Jigsaw blog template which helped me to get started.

Building my site on Jigsaw means that I will need an API that returns all my post. I like the idea of static sites because of their fast load time and ease of deployment especially on netlify. But I don't like the idea of my blog using APIs coupled with Jigsaw NPM errors that have been slowing down my progress. I decided to go monolithic which means that everything (frontend & backend) was going to be a single project.

Building on Laravel

I have been a Laravel developer for a while, so I choose to build on Laravel. To migrate to Laravel, I created a Laravel 6 project and copied all the frontend assets I have been using on Jigsaw to Laravel. Jigsaw made use of php, Laravel blades and Laravel mix. It was pretty easy since Jigsaw was built for Laravel developers.

Vuejs, Tailwindcss, Highlightjs & Fusejs.

Using NPM, I installed tailwindcss, highlightjs & fusejs which are all part of Jigsaw blog template. Laravel ships with vuejs so there is no need to install that again. Finally I have to recompile (npm run dev) the assets again and everything was working fine.

Wink - A Laravel-Based Publishing Platform

I used wink as my post editor. Wink is just like Medium post editor. If you have been writing on Medium you already know what I mean. So I just plugged in the wink Laravel package to my Laravel application and boom I have a publishing platform where I can draft and publish posts. Awesome!

Lite Blog - A Laravel Blog Generator

When I started building my blog, my boss was the first person to place an order for the same thing I was building. So when I was through with mine, I knew that I will have to duplicate everything on the project.

I don't like the idea of duplicating codes so I decided to make my blog a reusable Laravel project so that anybody can use it. The project is Lite Blog - a Laravel full (frontend & backend) blog generator.

After the pre-release version (0.4) of Lite Blog, I decided to delete my blog and rebuild it with Lite Blog. I can say that it was a seamless experience. If you are a Laravel developer, Lite Blog is worth giving a try.

You can also contribute to the project on github, one pull request at a time :)

Let's continue the discussion on twitter.