I’ve tried a bunch of different blogging platforms in my day. I used out-of-the-box tools like Blogger and Wordpress for a while. I also wrote a completely home-made application based on Python/Flask for some time. There’s plusses and minuses to everything, so it’s hard to say what tool is the best for you. For me, my interests keep on changing, so, the right tool seems to change as well.
In the end, the blogging software doesn’t matter nearly as much as the person writing the blog. I’ve had long periods where I stopped writing and publishing. None of the above blogging platforms could’ve helped me there. If you want to be a successful blogger, just start writing.
With that said, I’m now giving github pages a try.
Why github pages?
It’s free. Before, I was paying $5/month to self host. I can afford $5/month, but free is even more affordable.
It’s easy. I write in markdown and save my posts to github already. So switching my blogging/publishing to github pages doesn’t involve any extra work. It’s actually less work.
It seems like the right choice today. Github recently became part of Microsoft and Microsoft seems to be very developer friendly. If I’m wrong, and things aren’t so friendly here, I can always move this blob of text somewhere else.
Initial Impressions
I was able to get something up and working in a few minutes. But then, I found this guide which helped me transform my barebones site into a more fully featured blog.
I forked the repository, renamed it, and then dropped my old blog posts into the _posts directory. And everything just worked. Voila, I had a pretty functional blog. I then updated a couple fields in _config.xml to unlock some sweet blogging features.
RSS feed. You get this for free with github pages. Setting a value in the _config.yml will add a link to your RSS feed on the page. I still use RSS feeds, so this was convenient. Even better, I plan to register the rss feed to my dev.to account. I hope cross posting to dev.to should give me some readers.
For comments, I set up a new disqus site. Once you set that up, you need add it to the config. Then, you need to add comments: true to the front matter of each post.
To know how my blog is doing, I set up Google Analytics. I set up a new tracking ID and added it to the config. There’s obviously nothing much to see so far, but who knows, over time, maybe there will be something to smile about.
Parting thoughts
This post is mostly meant as a reminder to myself of when I switched blogging platforms, and what I was thinking and feeling today. New tools are fun. If this entices me to write a bit more, than it is worth the time.
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