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blog/weekly/20240227/index.md

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+---
+title: coreyja weekly - February 27th
+author: Corey Alexander
+date: 2024-02-27
+is_newsletter: true
+---
+
+Hello everyone, and a warm welcome to our new subscribers!
+
+In this edition, we delve into some exciting updates: my refocused plan, a preview of our upcoming logo redesign, and insights into my server-rendered blog's halted migration to Leptos, a Rust WASM-based framework.
+
+## Refocused Plan
+
+Recently I’ve been trying out a few different things! I’ve been doing my project streams like “usual” but I also tried to make a few “standard” length Youtube Videos.
+
+And I don’t think they are _bad_, but they aren’t as great as they could be. And they didn’t get the attention on Youtube my streams do.
+
+And a 10 minute edited video may take me multiple times longer than a single 2-3 hour stream! So I’m going to de-prioritize those videos for a bit, and focus on more streaming and project work.
+
+On that front “Status” is becoming “Up Guardian” and has a brand new logo in the works thanks to my wife Brandi! I might show the  new branding on stream next time, so look there and I’ll also feature it my next newsletter.
+
+## New `coreyja` Logo
+
+On the subject of branding, Brandi has been hard at work refining my personal brand identity, resulting in a sleek, new logo. Below is a sneak peek at one of the variants variants:
+
+Screenshot 2024-02-27 at 9.42.07 AM.png
+
+We also have some 'flat' variations designed for print purposes.
+
+I’m excited to roll these new logos out to my site!
+
+I was waiting for a recent refactor to be done on my blog before I updated the UI and logos, but recently I decided to put that refactor on hold.
+So it’s time to re-brand! Look for a mid-week stream where we change out the logos, and refine the UI a bit.
+
+## Keeping `coreyja.com` fully server rendered
+
+I’ve been recently playing around with [Leptos, A cutting-edge Rust framework for the modern web.](https://leptos.dev/), and I do _really_ like it! And I’m going to continue using it for UpGuardian.
+
+It’s isomorphic framework, where your application runs on BOTH the client and the server. It’s pretty cool!
+It’s combines Server Side Rendering and Client Side Rendering, and gives you a single “app” that runs on both the server and the client. When someone requests a page for the first time it is rendered on the server and sent to the browser. But if you navigate from one page to the next it makes a request for the data it needs to render the new page, and renders it on the client side. And it does this all with me only writing a single version of my app and components!
+
+But after playing with the migration for a bit, I’ve decided that for my blog, Leptos isn’t quite the right fit.
+And the biggest reason is probably that my blog doesn’t _need_ any client side logic, it’s purely static HTML and CSS right now. When I started the migration I decided I _needed_ to have interactive code snippets on my blog and kinda went off the deep end lol. But reigning it back it, I want to think about a different approach to client side interactivity for my site.
+
+The problem I ran into with Leptos, is that _sometimes_ I don’t really _want_ things to render on both the server side _and_ on the client side. My example was about markdown rendering, and then code snippet syntax highlighting. I ran into a few hiccups with my first implementation, but nothing too bad. But when I finished there was a good second or so where the page wasn’t usable cause it was parsing my markdown and doing syntax highlighting. And I _know_ I probably could have optimized this away. I might have been holding Leptos, or one of the “plugin” crates I choose wrong. Or rather I likely definitely was! The point isn’t that I _couldn’t_ solve the issue, it’s that I _had_ to solve it.
+
+See my current site is simple. Server rendered HTML, plain and simple. I avoided having to render on the client side, by not having a client side! Not revolutionary, but sometimes we have to remind ourselves of the basics lol.
+
+I’d spent this week separating out my application. Finding the crates that could and couldn’t run on the client side in WASM, and refactoring my code to separate out the two.
+
+And it turns out that for me, for this app, client side rendering doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t getting any of its benefits and paying for all its costs.
+
+So I’m going to leave the Leptos branch around for awhile, but likely not continue it for this project. I got farther on this migration than on UpGuardian, so I’ll definitely want to reference this code for at least the next week or two.
+
+Long term I want to use my blog to explore a different way to do full stack development. I’m not sure what that is yet, but the idea is “sprinkles of interactivity”. I’ve used [Stimulus](https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/) with [Rails](https://rubyonrails.org/) before, and I like some aspects about it. And there are parts of Leptos that I really liked and will take inspiration from! But for now I don’t have a specific use case for client side logic on my blog yet, so I’ll kick that can down the road a bit and keep brainstorming.
+
+If you have thoughts on Client Side vs Server Side rendering, or sprinkles of WASM I’d love to chat, just reply to this email!