Who starts a blog in 2019? Is it still a thing worth doing? Who will even read this? What platform should I use? What about should I write?
So many questions before I even start questioning if I should also be doing this. Yet, if you are reading this, that means I didn’t quit, and I published my words.
I’ve been blogging in the past, then I slowed down and eventually stopped. I felt a little burned out, I’ve lost motivation and interest in writing. But something about this nudged me, and I’ve always felt unsatisfied. Eventually, I wanted to relaunch my site, with more focus on writing and photography, with simplified tech stack and reduced maintenance.
Technical details
I think I’ve spent way too much time thinking about the tech setup of this blog. I’ve evaluated plenty of static site generators: GatsbyJS, Jekyll, Eleventy, Hexo, Next.js, Ghost, and Charge; all of them had their pros and cons, but in the end, none felt 100% right. I was also not exactly sure what I was looking for. I felt like I need some simple tooling, good support for images, writing, a bit of tinkering with the internals. After playing a bit with different choices, I’ve settled for GatsbyJS without any backend.
Gatsby, because it offers great flexibility in building the UI theme and allowing to use React components (which is really nice). I didn’t yet decide if I really need admin backend as with Gatsby, you can go with just having markdown files. This also allows a lot of flexibility in article customization - and exploring the art-directed style of some articles is something that always intrigued me.
Early in, I was also exploring idea of having Ghost as the backend, because it gives the possibility to also access it on the go with your mobile and slightly better image management, but in the end it was overcomplicating everything. Real-life will revisit this choice in the future.
My topics
I want to write about stuff around my life: share photos and memories, note my struggles with training and running, and occasionally express my thoughts and opinions about the world around me.
So here I am, starting my journey. I want this project to be the long run: to last as long as possible, to be meaningful for me and others, to be unique, entertaining, and a little thought-provoking.
I hope you’ll like it.
