A brief story of this blog.
One day you're working on cool personal projects, then you realize your insight might help someone else and then... You spend 2~ years building/rebuilding your blog, or not writing anything at all.
Born under punches
I started my tech career about three years ago (oct 2023), it's a very long story that i might tell on this blog someday.
Things moved for me at a neckbreaking speed, in less than a year i was able to do very fun work, including; Deploying and securing a home server exposed to the internet, managing networking technologies like VLANs, firewalls, IDS/IPS, developing different web applications with Django and serving them on my own server.
So, my next thought was: "I'll write a blog!, with guides of these projects and the purpose of sharing my knowledge.", i was relly naive back then, not because setting a blog is extremely complicated or something, but i couldn't comprehend how much of a perfectionist i would become.
I read hundreds of personal portfolios, blogs, self hosted repos, and tried to copy every single one of them. I tried retype, then docusaurus, then starlight, then splitting my portfolio into a static HTML page and my blog in starlight, then i went back to retype. Then dec last year hit and i realized i hadn't written a single entry, it was all drafts or time spent working on visual aspects of my sites, always trying to use "the best technology". It was unsustainable.
I found HUGO and while i find the framework very attractive, at the end of the day, it would imply learning a lot before writing anything at all.
To give you a quick summary of what i wanted in a blogging platform:
- Fast and lightweight, no heavy frontend.
- Open source and self hosted.
- Static (optional, but makes updating less of a priority).
- Markdown compatible.
- Minimalist (again, i'm no frontend dev, most of my time is spent on a terminal running tmux, if it's stable it's good)
And maybe you're more knowledgable in these subjects than me, but for me this was an non existent platform, until i finally found 11ty-base-blog. It offered the perfect balance between customization and defaults (meaning i don't need to spend hours editing CSS/HTML or JS). Setting it up was frictionless, so to any new readers I'll recommend the following:
- Your blogging platform/portfolio doesn't need to display all your skills, in my case it only shows that i can self host a static website (big deal right?).
- Less is more.
- Pick a platform that gets you writing ASAP, if you spent more than 2 hours setting it up, throw it away, working on it could potentially become a time leak.
- Don't overthink it, if you're seriously spending more than a day or two picking a platform/stack, then run down your spec, you're overreaching or trying to build the Duke Nukem Forever of blogging.
- Have fun, the site is not final, you can add more features later, change some of the structure, the difficult part is getting there in the first place, so start writing those .MDs.